Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina

Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina

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Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina Brenda Werth

theatre, performance, and memory politics in argentina Copyright © Brenda Werth, 2010 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10434–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Werth, Brenda G. Theatre, performance, and memory politics in Argentina / Brenda Werth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–10434–1 (alk. paper) 1. Theater and society—Argentina. 2. Theater—Political aspects— Argentina. 3. Argentine drama—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Politics and literature—Argentina. I. Title. PN2451.W47 2010 306.4 8480982—dc22 2010009103 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: October 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina

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1 Transition and the Performance of Retroactive Justice

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2 From Antigone to Orpheus: Alternative Myths and Figures of Mourning

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3 Performing Confessions Onstage and on the Stand

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4 Argentina’s Postdictatorial Stages: Resting Places and Places of Unrest

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5 Argentina’s Middle Class: Paradigm of Crisis and Renewal

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6 Intergenerational Memory and Performative Acts of Recovery

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

This book has benefitted immensely from conversations I have had with Argentine theatre practitioners and artists over the years. I am grateful to Griselda Gambaro, Eduardo Pavlovsky, Ricardo Monti, Laura Yusem, Emilio García Wehbi, Norman Briski, Cristina Escofet, Daniel Veronese, Alberto Ure, César D’Angiolillo, Eduardo Rovner, Héctor Levy-Daniel, and Vivi Tellas for their kindness and willingness to meet to discuss their work with me. At Rutgers, Tomás Eloy Martínez very generously put me in contact with many of these individuals. My deepes thanks go to Osvaldo Pellettieri for his scholarly guidance and for allowing me access to the GETEA (Grupo de estudios de teatro argentino, University of Buenos Aires) research group and theatre library from 2003 to 2005. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Jelin for facilitating my affiliation with the research group on memory studies (Núcleo de estudios sobre la memoria), housed at the Institute of Economic and Social Development (IDES) at the University of Buenos Aires. My heartfelt thanks go out to Emilio Crenzel and Rossana Nofal for their scholarly insights and for providing valuable feedback on my project. In Buenos Aires I have had the opportunity to establish ongoing dialogue with Argentine theatre scholars. I am grateful to Jorge Dubatti for the chance to attend his Escuela de espectadores (Spectatorship School) and to witness the lively exchange of ideas circulated among spectators of contemporary theatre in Buenos Aires. Beatriz Trastoy kindly met with me on several occasions and provided excellent feedback on the articles I submitted to Telondefondo, a University of Buenos Aires journal that she directs on theatrical theory and criticism. Many thanks to Martín Rodríguez for illuminating key features

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of nineteenth-century Argentine theatre, to Lucas Rimoldi for his intriguing insights on twenty-first-century theatre, and to Grisby Ogás Puga, who has been a constant collaborator as well as a dear friend. While undertaking research in Buenos Aires between 2003 and 2005 I came in contact with many incredible individuals, whose input made a significant contribution to this project. I would like to thank Kerry Bystrom, Kelly Raspberry, Michelle Cohen, Julieta Vitullo, May Summer Farnsworth, Mireille Abelin, and Rachel Galvin for sharing ideas and reading early versions of parts of the manuscript. I am also grateful for the wonderful community of researchers and friends in Buenos Aires from 2003 to 2005: Gastón Giribet, Analía Yaker-Valle, Amy Kirschenbaum, Jennifer Adair, Karen Faulk, Felipe Gómez, Sarah MacCarthy, Julia Sarreal, Xavier Pardo, and Veera Jansa. And were it not for Lisandro Aronín, this project would never have come to fruition. Always kind, warm, and professional, the librarians at the theatre library Argentores, Blanca Lozano and Federico Rodríguez Salcedo, were extraordinarily helpful, assisting me in locating manuscripts and putting me in contact with playwrights. My utmost gratitude goes to Kive Staiff, director of the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires, and to Ana María Monti, in the Press Department at the San Martín Theatre, for authorizing use of photographs. Also, I would like to thank Carolina Soler for her creative vision in designing the cover image of the book. I have been fortunate to have institutional support at different stages of the project. American University awarded me a summer Mellon research stipend to undertake research in Buenos Aires (2007) and granted me a junior leave (2008), which were essential to completing the manuscript. I would like to thank my colleagues Jack Child, Amy Oliver, Consuelo Hernández, and Ana Serra for their unwavering encouragement and for reading drafts of proposals. My research assistants, Mary Elizabeth Pritchard and Matthew Smith, offered meticulous assistance with archival work, formatting, and bibliographical searches. One major source of academic and personal support has been the writing group that emerged cross-departmentally at American University. I am deeply grateful to Susan Shepler, Kate Haulman, Rachel Sullivan Robinson, Adrea Lawrence, Kristin Diwan, and Elizabeth Anderson Worden, for reading several chapter drafts.

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While a graduate student at Rutgers, I received a fellowship from the Transliteratures program, which gave me the opportunity to spend a year in Buenos Aires (2003–2004) to conduct research and writing. Also, the project would not have been possible without the support of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant (2004–2005), which permitted me an additional year of research and broadened my network of scholars in Buenos Aires. The members of my dissertation committee, Camilla Stevens, Marcy Schwartz, and Phyllis Zatlin, had a major role in the development of this project. Their intellectual rigor and professionalism made writing the dissertation a pleasure. I am also grateful to have had the chance to participate in the productive dialogue generated at the Berlin Roundtables on Memory Politics, sponsored by the Irmgard Coninx Foundation (October, 2009). Special thanks go to Magdalena Zolkos and Susanne Buckley-Zistel for their effective leadership of our workgroup on political discourse. A number of U.S.-based individuals have had significant influence on the shape and direction of this project. I would like to thank Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton at Palgrave for their support, patience, and professionalism throughout the process. My gratitude goes to Jean Graham-Jones for her excellent feedback as external reader of my dissertation and for her helpful comments on a draft of chapter 4, on Ricardo Monti. I am also grateful to her for involving me in the BAiT (Buenos Aires in Translation, NYC, 2006) project, directed by Shoshana Polanco, which provided me with a fantastic opportunity to work with four up-and-coming Argentine playwrights premiering their work in New York City. My sincere thanks go to Stuart Day for his careful reading and enlightening comments on the manuscript and to Carey Kasten and Maria Cabo for providing valuable comments on several chapters. I would also like to express my utmost regard and appreciation for Gail Bulman, Mónica Botta, Noe Montez, Sharon Magnarelli, Sarah Misemer, Lola Proaño Gómez, María Silvina Persino, and Ariel Strichartz, whose scholarship on Argentine theatre has contributed significantly to this project in different ways. Last but not least, I would also like to thank Paola Hernández, Kerry Bystrom, and May Summer Farnsworth for being faithful collaborators, critics, voices of reason, and most of all wonderful friends. Several conferences have been particularly important in the evolution of the project. The Latin American Theatre Today conferences

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(University of Kansas, 2003; University of Connecticut, 2005; Virginia Tech, 2008) and the GETEA conferences, directed by Osvaldo Pellettieri and held annually in Buenos Aires, provided productive venues for dialogue on Latin American theatre. The biennial Encuentros, sponsored by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics have been crucial to developing a critical perspective of the relationships between performance, politics, and memory. I would like to thank the participants in our working group “The World and the Stage” (Encuentro: Staging Citizenship: Performance and Politics of Cultural Rights, Bogotá, 2009) for productive conversations on rights, citizenship, and identity. Many thanks to Kerry Bystrom and Florian Becker for inviting me to co-organize the seminar “Human Rights in/as Performance,” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Long Beach, 2008. I would like to thank the people in my life who perhaps did not have a direct connection to this project but nonetheless provided the love and support necessary in order to carry it out. To Bernadette, Bruno, Claudia, Macarena, María, Nadia, Jessica, Julieta, and Selma, for making Rutgers an enjoyable place to be. My deepest gratitude goes out to Andrew for being an exceptional listener and a sharp but kind critic throughout the writing process and to Bridget, Carol, and Lisa for being excellent friends and interlocutors for so many years. Last but not least, I would like to thank my mom, Kit, dad, Sue, and Holly, for everything.

Introduction: Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina ESTEBAN: Yo he vivido antes esto. MARGARITA: ¿Qué? ESTEBAN: Esta noche. Lejos, en un recuerdo que no es éste mío. Una pieza así . . . con esa puerta cerrada . . . lloviendo . . . con esa luz . . . usted mirándome así.1 [ESTEBAN: I have lived this before. MARGARITA: What? ESTEBAN: This night. Far away, in a memory that is not mine. A flat like this one . . . with that door closed . . . raining . . . with that light . . . you, looking at me that way.]2

In this scene from the play Stéfano (1928), by Argentina’s preeminent playwright Armando Discépolo, Esteban describes the sensation of living a memory that belongs to someone else: a memory that feels both alienating and inalienable to him. Under his mother’s steady gaze, Esteban recognizes the weight of this memory and asserts his subjectivity in a negotiation of influences that shapes the story of his own coming of age. Esteban’s memory of his father, his mother’s gaze, and the familiar/unfamiliar setting all contribute to emphasizing the interconnectedness between memory and family. Maurice Halbwachs pioneered the idea of collective memory and the assertion that the act of recollection takes place in social frameworks of memory.3 Traditionally, the family provides the most basic social context for the utterance of first words, memories, and individual identity formation. Discépolo’s Stéfano replicates this fundamental memory context, but

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Esteban’s articulation of a memory that does not belong to him adds complexity here, alluding to a poetics of memory that is of central importance to this book. Marianne Hirsch’s work on postmemory is illuminating in considering this complex identification. According to Hirsch, “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”4 In the case of Esteban, his father’s trauma results from the alienating experience of immigration to Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century. In the play, Esteban’s inability to understand his father’s traumatic experience ironically seems to increase rather than decrease identification with him, to the point that he assumes his father’s memories as his own, while recognizing the uncanniness of the sensation. In postdictatorial Argentina, theatre continues to construct scenarios of intergenerational memory, though under a very different set of circumstances. During this period, as Elizabeth Jelin notes, “la transmisión de saberes y sentidos del pasado se torna una cuestión abierta y pública, objeto de luchas estratégicas y de ‘políticas de la memoria’ ” [the transmission of knowledge and a sense of the past become an open and public question, an object of strategic struggles and of a “politics of memory”].5 Spanning from 1983 to 2009, the works included in this book capture the response of a new generation of artists to this “open and public question” in the effort to reconstruct the past, to negotiate between private and public histories, and to imagine a present and a future that are informed but not overshadowed by the past. More broadly, Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics demonstrates how theatre and performance intervene in Argentina’s postdictatorial memory politics from 1983 to 2009. Implicit in the elusive category of postdictatorship should be read the diversity of a period including the transition to democracy, nine presidencies, human rights trials, amnesties, the deepening of neoliberalism, economic collapse, increased social polarization, a diminished middle class, and the resurgence of the nineteenth-century division between Buenos Aires and the provinces. Several main strands of inquiry run through this book: First, I argue that theatre and performance provide an ideal forum for examining contemporary vulnerabilities of the human body, understood both in the context of postdictatorial Argentina and in a

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global framework of interconnected economic, human rights, and legal systems. Second, I analyze dramatic works that gesture toward postdictatorial mourning and the reconstruction of community while simultaneously complicating the often normative messages of national reconciliation, particularly when advanced by those groups and individuals that most benefit from a tabula rasa approach to the past. Third, I identify key performative juxtapositions that show the ways theatre both complements and contests legal and political performances staged outside a conventional theatrical framework. In framing these moments of synchrony, I draw attention to (1) the unique strengths and limitations of theatre in providing extralegal strategies for performing retroactive justice and (2) theatre’s ability to satirize and generate resistance to the embrace of neoliberal policies and amnesia politics in Argentina during the nineties. In expanding the scope of performance to include select trials, ceremonies, and protests, this book investigates the ways theatre-, activist-, and state-orchestrated performances contest and enable one another in the transformation of postdictatorial memory politics. And finally, I examine how theatre and performance participate in the politicization of family discourse over the course of the postdictatorial period, particularly in the construction of paternity and maternity in plays during the transitional eighties and in the reassessment of the traditional family model during the neoliberal nineties and onward. The Family: Metaphor for Nation and Model for Activism

In her book Entre el parentesco y la política: Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, Judith Filc writes that the family proved to be an efficacious metaphor, invoked frequently by the military during dictatorship because of its liminal nature as both a public and private, and cultural and natural entity.6 According to Filc, the military sought to restore the essential (Catholic, moral) values of the nation, captured in the tripartite “God, Patria, Home,” in a campaign designed to prevent “penetration” of the nation by the “subversives” (35). The military government employed metaphors of sickness freely in their attempt to emphasize the vulnerability of the nation, particularly the youth, to the risk of infection by diseased elements that had to be extracted from the national body (35). Following the metaphor, the national

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body consisted of cells, each representing the family and a pillar of society (42). In this way, Filc observes, biology and social structure were linked, imbuing family roles and values with a “natural” character (42). The military’s manipulation of the metaphor of sickness, in addition to the metaphor of absolute war against “subversion,” effectively collapsed the division between inside and outside, private and public, making all boundaries permeable and penetrable to the military, who envisioned themselves as the fathers of the nation (39, 42, 47). In her discussion of theatre under dictatorship, Jean GrahamJones writes that staging the family became particularly pertinent in the late seventies in light of the national project to preserve the Western, Christian family.7 Specifically, according to Graham-Jones, the “enclosed space of the house or apartment effectively represented the country under dictatorship” (28). In addition to capturing the oppressive climate of dictatorship, representations of enclosure in theatre also allude to the angst of absolute permeability between private and public spheres, which effectively eliminated any form of mediation between the state and its citizens.8 Ana Amado and Nora Domínguez write that to imagine a nation has always implied imagining a certain type of family.9 Historically, they observe, violence, not sentimental love, links these family genealogies to the construction of the national imagination, the terms being political, not private (20). They add that in spite of changes in the paradigms that link national projects to subjects during the twentieth century, the “peso simbólico de la filiación paterna” [the symbolic weight of the paternal affiliation] is still felt in references to power, whether expressed in the form of God, Nation, Patria, or Democracy (31). The construction of paternity is central to Diana Taylor’s analysis of the gendering and performance of nationness under dictatorship in her book Disappearing Acts. She writes, “Gender, then, was not simply the regulatory social system through which each sex assumed and incorporated the attributes assigned to it; it was also performative in that gender roles could be assumed or imposed, either unconsciously and apparently ‘naturally,’ or through open or coercive acts of violence.”10 As a preview to her analysis on the dictatorial period, Taylor introduces three distinct historical antecedents (the nineteenth-century Rosas regime, the consolidation of the armed forces in the early twentieth century, and Peronism) that exemplify how the construction of spectacles of masculinity and femininity

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served to empower the fathers of the nation, while simultaneously marginalizing the “women and nonassimilable men” (71). As Taylor shows, these historical examples help demonstrate why the Junta was so successful in staging the military coup of 1976 and their “Proceso de Reorganizción Nacional” (Process of National Reorganization), as a restoration of power. In describing one of the military parades, Taylor remarks, “The iterability of the performance contributed to the dictatorship’s legitimacy. The ‘restored’ nature of the performance suggested that order itself had been restored. The military display acted, enacted, and reenacted the (new—now more than ever—always) social system: all male, Catholic, and strictly hierarchical” (67). This iterability of power, nation, and gendered roles again signals a genealogy in which the discourse of family (mothers, fathers, children of the nation) plays a prominent role.11 In examining this genealogy, Amado and Domínguez write, “al subrayar lo familiar desde los lazos intentamos poner en evidencia el doble mecanismo de enlace y separación, de atadura y corte” [in placing emphasis on family ties, our attempt is to make evident the double mechanism of bond and separation, of a tethering and rupture].12 In thinking about the social and political implications of the reiteration of family discourse throughout Argentina’s history, it is useful to focus on the continuities that perpetuate certain family models and on the ruptures that pose resistance to those models and open space for alternatives. Filc notes that during and after the dictatorship, activist groups such as the Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos por Razones Políticas (Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared for Political Reasons, founded in 1976), the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, founded in 1977), and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, founded in 1979) provided an alternative model of family that rejected the military’s definition of family as natural and biological and instead put forth a version of family based on shared experience, community, and similar political objectives.13 Building on the work of Maryssa Navarro, Elizabeth Jelin, and others,14 Filc explains that these groups emerged to occupy the role as mediator between the state and the citizenry, a role that had been usurped by the military and made obsolete under dictatorship (66). Theatre and performance provide an optic for reflection upon the development and transformation of family discourse in relation to the state and citizenry during the postdictatorial period. The

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plays analyzed in this book offer a broad spectrum of alternative family models, some more successful than others. In addition to conventionally staged works, other performative phenomena (trials, protests) make apparent contrasting political uses of family discourse during postdictatorship. Time, Place, and Global Action

How does theatre respond to the upheaval of time, place, and action generated by evolving globalized paradigms and the expansion of the jurisdiction of global human rights? According to Ulrich Beck, the successes and limitations of globalization must be considered in relation to the parameters of space, time, and the “social density of the transnational networks, relationships and image-flows.”15 Beck then elaborates upon this conceptualization to explain what distinguishes contemporary globalization processes from historical antecedents and argues, “What is new is not only the everyday life and interaction across national frontiers, in dense networks with a high degree of mutual dependence and obligation. New, too, is the self-perception of this transnationality” (12). Mapping out space and employing tropes of reflection and metadramatic techniques, theatre is a highly selfconscious and a most adept genre for the exploration of this newfound “self-perception of transnationality.” Theatre during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has captured a broad range of responses to globalization. According to Dan Rebellato, this theatre reflects the ambivalence between “resistance and acceptance of the new global world.”16 This study focuses more intently on what Paola Hernández has identified as theatre’s ability to expose the fragility of humanity made manifest through processes of globalization.17 In turn, I argue, this exposure of fragility draws attention to the urgency for recourse and the need to protect humanity and to engage human rights issues more meaningfully in relation to discourses of globalization.In her work on applied theatre, Helen Nicholson observes, “If economic interests, human rights and democratic politics are complexly interwoven, it follows that all interventions associated with human rights, including those carried out in applied drama, are inevitably caught up in this larger conceptual scheme.”18 Drawing on Nicholson, this project thus poses the question of human fragility and its exposure/ protection through theatre in a framework in which global models

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of capitalism and human rights merge and contrast with national conceptions of democracy and governance. In Argentina, during the transition and throughout the postdictatorial period, a number of theatre practitioners used the stage to enact scenarios of mourning and retroactive justice, to provide testimony to the past, to perform commemorative rituals, and to denounce state-sanctioned impunity.19 These plays provide scenarios of national recovery, but more central to this study are the ways in which they exploit the tensions between state and global definitions of accountability and human rights. Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa (Furious Antigone, 1986), for example, in addition to commemorating the courageous work of the Madres and glorifying the figure of Antigone as an icon for retroactive justice, highlights the negotiation between a universal and local subject of human rights, a negotiation at the heart of transitional milestones such as Argentina’s Truth Commission Report Nunca Más (Never Again) and the prosecution of nine of the high-ranked military generals in what was coined the “Trial of the Century” in 1985. In the wake of the World Wars, Hannah Arendt wrote that shifting power relations had made “national sovereignty a mockery.”20 Arendt’s statement resonates strongly in late-twentieth-century developments of international law, the framework that has emerged to provide a tangible response to human rights claims “in a world that has left behind the national state.”21 The legal scholar and human rights expert Ruti Teitel affirms the strengthening influence of the idea of universal jurisdiction, the growth of humanitarianism, and the replacement of state-protected rights by globally enforced ones, but cautions that “despite claims to universal reach, international affairs depend for the most part on the continued adherence to principles of nationality and territoriality and on state consent. Moreover, in this universal framework, the rule of law in question is thin, implicating the protection only of the most basic, bodily integrity rights.”22 Crimes against humanity—“unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity”—are crimes that at a very basic level violate these bodily integrity rights.23 In the wake of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón’s landmark decision to issue the arrest and extradition of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain (1998), the ensuing human rights trials of Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague (2002), and Argentine ex-naval officer Adolfo Scilingo’s trial in Madrid (2005), the protection

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of this very basic bodily integrity has become a universal, ethical concern, particularly when states are unable or unwilling to offer this protection.24 Theatre is uniquely capable of framing the question of bodily integrity and articulating the scope, virtues, and limitations of the notion of a universal subject of human rights. Several of the plays and urban interventions discussed in this book address threats to this integrity, specifically originating under dictatorship and later arriving in the form of President Carlos Saúl Menem’s neoliberalism of the nineties and its aftermath. Often regarded as the foremost champion of neoliberal policy during the nineties decade in Argentina, and subsequently held responsible for the debilitating economic crisis exploding in 2001, Menem represents, above all, a continuation and intensification of a neoliberal agenda already implemented during the military dictatorship under Economy Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz. When Menem took power in 1989, he inherited a country reeling from massive economic instability, policy failure, hyperinflation, and staggering foreign debt.25 Recovery required a renegotiation of foreign debt to ensure renewed flow of capital, but, as Eduardo Silva notes, international institutions (IMF, the World Bank, foreign investors) “made free-market economic stabilization and restructuring a condition for debt relief and access to international capital markets” (58). Compounding these external pressures, Menem “reformed” the Supreme Court by stacking it with staunch allies and centralizing power in the executive (59). Menem’s particularly authoritarian brand of neoliberalism generated unprecedented social exclusion, reflected in the emergence of the newly poor, the disenfranchised middle class, and growing popular opposition during the nineties. In the mid-eighties, Gambaro worked closely with the classically trained dancer and theatre director Laura Yusem to create a version of Antigone inspired by bodily movement, showcasing the commemorative burial rite and symbolic act of bodily recovery that Antígona performs onstage for her slain brother. Conversely, Roberto Cossa’s El Saludador (The Greeter, 1999) dramatizes the disintegration of the protagonist’s body, as he travels back and forth between his home in Buenos Aires and cities around the world, each time returning with another missing limb. Steeled with socialist fantasies and unbending idealism but ill-equipped to navigate world politics and economics at the turn of the twenty-first century, the main character in El Saludador

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fails to reconcile a local and global sense of self; his bodily transformations onstage demonstrate the collision between bodies and neoliberalism and how, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes observes, “the concepts of the integrity of the body and human dignity have given way to ideas of the divisible body and detachable organs as commodities.”26 The theatre group Los Macocos further investigates the relationship between bodily integrity and disintegration in the context of neoliberalism and the economic crisis of 2001 in Los Albornoz (2001). In this play documenting the crisis of Argentina’s middle class, characters are forced to sell their organs illegally on the international market and prostitute their bodies to save their family, held together by the grandmother’s capitalist zeal and the mediating influence of reality television. In dramatizing the entrance of bodies into the global market as simultaneous with their social marginalization, these plays show the effects of Menemism on Argentina’s middle class and present a reassessment of the body politic and discourses of exclusion arising during the nineties. Emilio García Wehbi’s urban intervention Proyecto Filoctetes (Project Philoctetes, 2002) features lifelike mannequins placed in positions of distress in heavily trafficked areas in downtown Buenos Aires.27 Wehbi uses the city as the stage to perform the presence of excluded bodies in an attempt to shock onlookers into self-analysis and to introduce an ethics of spectatorship in the everyday experience of urban life, specifically in relation to the crisis of 2001 and the subsequent increase in the presence and visibility of the homeless in the streets of Buenos Aires in the late nineties and early twenty-first century. By inserting these bodies into the urban landscape and framing the interaction between bodies and onlookers, Wehbi’s project reconstitutes those individuals excluded from society—the “new poor” and victims hardest hit by Menem’s economic policy of the nineties—as subjects and protagonists in unfolding national and global dramas of the twenty-first century.28 Unconscious Acting Out versus Conscious Acting

Freudian readings of trauma theory privilege narrative as the essential form for remembering and articulating traumatic experience.29 The psychiatrist and trauma specialist Judith Herman remarks that one of the most important goals in recovery is “to put the story, including its imagery, into words.”30 The ability to narrate the past into a coherent,

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ordered sequence of ideas and events represents a triumph over the repression of the past. Ironically, though, this model may inadvertently repress the body or frame embodied practice too reductively in terms of symptoms, acting out, or unconscious manifestation in the attempt to uphold the integrity of the narrative. Indeed, elaborating upon Freud’s theories of trauma may unintentionally create a separation between bodies and words in transmitting knowledge of past experience. Moreover, when folded into official discourse, narratives of collective trauma may advance normative messages of reconciliation and overshadow other modes of embodied expression that contribute to shaping the debates surrounding the politics of memory. Hayden White stresses that historical narratives only prove necessary when events of the past are in dispute.31 In Argentina, during the transition and throughout the postdictatorship period, an unresolved, disputed past gave rise to many competing narratives to form a complex memoryscape. In her work on postdictatorial memory in Argentina, Jelin emphasizes that the space of memory is the space of political struggle. She writes, “La ‘memoria contra el olvido’ o ‘contra el silencio’ esconde lo que en realidad es una oposición entre distintas memorias rivales (cada una de ellas con sus propios olvidos). Es en verdad ‘memoria contra memoria’ ” [“Memory against forgetting” or “against silence” hides what in reality is the opposition between rival memories (each one with its own forgetting). In reality, it is “memory against memory”].32 Politicians, artists, military, human rights advocates, clergy, and others act as agents or “emprendedores” (entrepreneurs) of memory, advancing their distinct narratives of the past and contributing to a charged memory climate.33 White’s assertion that there is a “moralizing impulse”34 innate to these narratives has influenced studies on the role of narrative in the wake of atrocity. Joseph Slaughter examines the relationship between human rights discourse and the narrative form and calls the Bildungsroman and human rights “mutually enabling fictions.”35 Allen Feldman identifies “a normative and moralizing periodization built into the post-violent depiction of violence.”36 Feldman is wary of the institutional manipulation of post-violence narratives to achieve a cathartic, therapeutic goal, which may eclipse the violence of the narrative to proclaim resolution (164). And in a similar vein, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith lend a critical eye to the role of the beneficiaries—the observers who benefit from the therapeutic model of reconciliation—in their discussion of the relationship between

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victims, perpetrators, and bystanders in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.37 In Argentina, already during the transition the Catholic Church began to promote narratives of healing through reconciliation, later adapted and celebrated by Menem in conjunction with his neoliberal project during the nineties. In contrast, human rights groups have traditionally rejected the idea of reconciliation. The former general counsel of Human Rights Watch, Juan Méndez of Argentina, proclaims, “Without public acknowledgment, reconciliation is an empty gesture, or worse, another name for impunity.”38 Recent scholarship on transitional justice is more discerning of the political and economic agendas motivating a discourse of reconciliation and healing and even questions the extent to which public narratives of trauma can be therapeutic, especially if they enable the impunity of the perpetrators, are subject to commodification, or universalize the experiences of victims.39 This book argues that many different genres of expression, including narrative, have a profound influence on individual and collective recovery. However, it also explores alternative messages that counter the often one-dimensional narratives of reconciliation promoted by various interests in transitional contexts. Theatre and performance complicate the primacy of the narrative form held by Freudian interpretations of trauma theory by engaging bodies in the conscious enactment of memory scenarios.40 Andreas Huyssen writes, To collapse memory into trauma, I think, would unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering, and loss. It would deny human agency and lock us into compulsive repetition. Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public, is always more than only the prison house of the past.41

Human agency here can allude to a performative component of memory and the ability to replace the idea of unconscious acting out with conscious acts. My analysis draws on Diana Taylor’s critical scholarship on political agency and embodied practice and builds on her assertion that “embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing.”42 The transformative potential of performance is of central importance to this book, and I explore this potential in tandem with Richard Schechner’s notion of “restored behavior,” Marvin Carlson’s “ghosting,” and Joseph Roach’s

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“surrogation.”43 In addition to highlighting repetition, a sense of doubleness, and the impossible embodiment of the original, these theories all capture a sense of the “before and after” that has developed into a key paradigm for positioning oneself in relation to the traumatic events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Embodying Human Rights/Rites on Argentina’s Postdictatorial Stages

After the systematic torture and disappearance of an estimated 30,000 individuals during Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976–1983), the prominence of the body in theatre and performance of the eighties and nineties acquired unique significance. Argentine theatre scholar Beatriz Trastoy writes, Si el terrorismo de Estado que implantó la última dictadura militar se basó en la desaparición forzada de personas y en el obstinado silencio oficial referido al destino último de las víctimas, silencio que contrastaba con el estremecedor relato de testigos y sobrevivientes, no ha de sorprender, entonces, que cuerpo y narración hayan sido los ejes estructuradores de estas nuevas tendencias escénicas.”44 [If the state terrorism instituted by the last military dictatorship was based on the forced disappearance of individuals and the obstinate official silence surrounding the fates of the victims—silence that contrasted with the chilling accounts of witnesses and survivors—then it should not be surprising that body and narration are the two structuring axes of these new stage tendencies.]

Although by definition almost all theatre brings together bodies and narratives onstage, in the case of postdictatorial Argentine theatre, the interaction between bodies and scripts often reveals competing memory politics, objectives, and the negotiations between actions taken under dictatorship and official narratives used to describe those actions during democracy. Several of the plays analyzed here sabotage historical revision and undermine attempts to make the moralizing impulse of reconciliation an integral component of democratic transition. In 1989, for example, the playwright Ricardo Monti resurrects the nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in his highly metatheatrical play Una pasión sudamericana (A South American Passion Play). In an ironic act of synchrony, and evocative of the high

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stakes involved in memory manipulation, President Menem officiated the intricately choreographed repatriation ceremony of Rosas from England to Argentina just one month before the premiere of Monti’s play. Menem sought to inter Argentina’s past—both materially and symbolically—through the reburial of the polemical national figure and his accompanying speeches proclaiming a need for national harmony and healing. More insidiously, Menem used the repatriation ceremony as a platform to prepare the general public for the sweeping amnesty that he would approve just a week later, freeing military officers from prosecution of crimes committed during the dictatorship. Monti’s staged return of Rosas in theatre injects irony into a seamless narrative of national harmony envisioned by Menem, who recognizes one highly visible national body in the state burial of Rosas, while pardoning the individuals responsible for the disappearance of tens of thousands of bodies. The reincarnation of Rosas onstage just one month after his state burial, in the character of the crazed brigadier—omnipotent, homicidal, and confident of his immunity— exposes the profound imperfection of reconciliation as a national project in Argentina during the nineties. Throughout the book I analyze the way theatre interacts with stateorchestrated performances such as the repatriation ceremony of Rosas or the trial against the military generals in 1985. Baz Kershaw refers to the potentially productive interaction that might occur between the “micro-level of individual shows and the macro-level of the sociopolitical order.”45 Susan Bennett cites the tension that erupts “between the inner frame of the fictional stage world, the audience’s moment by moment perception of that in the experience of a social group, and the outer frame of community.”46 While the paradigm of framing works well for distinguishing and categorizing experience, perhaps most interesting to consider are the special vulnerabilities of the frames.47 Schechner expresses dissatisfaction with the impermeability of framing and suggests that a “net” might be better, as “a porous, flexible gatherer; a three-dimensional, dynamic, flow-through container.”48 Likewise, Erving Goffman’s discussion of “out-of-frame” activity alludes to the possibility of transgression of the borders of such frameworks that regulate actions and norms of behavior. Envisioning a porous barrier between performances organized by the state and theatre allows for a rich interpenetration and unveiling of impulses, agendas, and hierarchies during postdictatorship.

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Consider, for example, the strident proclamations of denial that the military generals made on the stand during their prosecution in the state-commissioned trial of 1985. Refusing any admission of wrongdoing, they adhered fiercely to an ideology that framed all their actions as a part of a collective, moral obligation to save the patria. Simultaneously, in a small, independent theatre in Palermo, the playwright and actor Eduardo Pavlovsky was onstage performing Potestad (Power/Authority), playing the role of a mourning father whose daughter, the audience first infers, has been kidnapped and disappeared under dictatorship. Alone onstage, the father narrates his grief and pantomimes desperately the last moment of a family scene on a Saturday afternoon before his daughter is forcibly taken from the family living room. The play’s shocking impact comes at the end, when the father undergoes a grotesque identity transformation and reveals to the audience that he is a medical doctor who had forged the death certificates of a couple and had taken their newborn baby and raised her with his wife as their own daughter. Afterward, spectators are left stunned and indignant that they had identified so strongly with a character that revealed himself to be a repressor at the end of the play. In 1985, perpetrators acted on the stand, claiming innocence and feigning ignorance of crimes, while actors onstage played the role of perpetrators, in both frameworks creating identity inversions and lunging the discourse of confession and acknowledgment of criminality into the public sphere. Pavlovsky has continued to play the role of the perpetrator in Potestad throughout the nineties and into the twenty-first century and has gradually attracted a following of younger spectators belonging to a new generation, who identify less with the father figure and more with the daughter character. In the mid-nineties the vow of silence that the military had taken to safeguard their discourse of denial was irrevocably broken when the ex-naval officer Adolfo Scilingo confessed publicly on television to his personal involvement in the death flights carried out during the dictatorship, in which drugged prisoners were thrown to their deaths in the Río de la Plata. His sensational confession marked the beginning of the end of impunity for perpetrators who had benefitted from the Final Stop and Due Obedience Laws of the mid-eighties. In a landmark speech, also in 1995, Chief of the Armed Forces Martín Balza publicly refuted the argument that the ends justified the means and called due obedience to immoral orders unconstitutional. Argentina’s state-issued amnesties

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granted during the transition began to lose their strength in the late nineties as international law gained influence and crimes committed under dictatorship increasingly became referred to as crimes against humanity and subject to universal jurisdiction. The expansion of legal jurisdiction and reassessment of accountability in a global context produced a new repertoire of performances as well. In this book I examine Scilingo’s case to discuss what happens to scripts of confession when state amnesties crumble and perpetrators who once performed their confessions with absolute immunity suddenly find that their criminal accounts may be used against them under newly envisioned legal jurisdictions. Little did Scilingo know that when he flew to Madrid in 1997 to meet with Judge Baltasar Garzón to offer his horrifying account once again, he would be taken into custody and tried in a Spanish court for crimes against humanity. In a watershed moment for international human rights, in 2005 Scilingo was sentenced to over 1,000 years in prison, a verdict achieved in spite of Scilingo’s performance of fainting spells, disorientation, and amnesia. On the stand, Scilingo performed his retraction viscerally; he consciously enacted bodily malfunction as his only remaining defense against his previously recorded and published confessional narrative. Trial observers were called upon to discern the authenticity of his narratives by examining his body language and comparing contradictory scripts. More than twenty years after the end of the dictatorship, after trials and amnesties, and amid the steady accumulation of evidence and information available to incriminate perpetrators, the interpretive framework has changed and expanded, and spectators are more attentive to the nuances of these performances both on- and offstage. Pavlovsky’s Potestad, for example, has now become a classic Argentine drama and permanent fixture in the country’s cultural imaginary. Though gradual familiarization with the performance over time has detracted attention from the surprise element, the play has acquired importance as an ongoing reminder of the need for vigilance and monitoring of impunity. Postdictatorial Spectatorship: Exorcising the Demons of Democracy

“The doctrine of two demons” refers to the thesis that guerrilla militancy groups like Montoneros and ERP (People’s Revolutionary

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Army/Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo) were engaged in bilateral warfare with the military during the dictatorship. A corollary to the National Security Doctrine, the doctrine of two demons helped the Argentine military justify what they deemed as their “Dirty War” against subversion and their ongoing campaign against international Marxism in the effort to protect the patria. The doctrine of two demons acquired visibility in public discourse after the fall of the military regime, when it intersected in unexpected ways with the arrival of democracy and the conciliatory objectives associated with a break from the past and the transition to a pluralistic, democratic system. Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo describe how proponents of democracy inadvertently recognized and to an extent upheld the doctrine of two demons by claiming that democracy had overcome and neutralized this two-sided conflict.49 In the original truth commission report, Nunca Más (1984) for example, the prologue begins with the following statement: “Durante la década del 70 la Argentina fue convulsionada por un terror que provenía tanto desde la extrema derecha como de la extrema izquierda” [During the decade of the seventies, Argentina was convulsed by terror originating from the extreme right as well as from the extreme left].50 This statement reflects the ill-conceived doctrine of two demons as elaborated during the transition.51 In striving to show democratic fairness by dividing blame equally between two warring factions, the statement “compares the incomparable” by drawing parallels between state-organized mass murder and loosely organized militancy by groups that by the beginning of the dictatorship were already significantly disabled.52 In recognition of the gross inaccuracy of this premise, in 2006 the Ministry of Human Rights included an additional prologue to the original prologue in a reedited version of Nunca Más, published on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup, which states that “es inaceptable pretender justificar el terrorismo de Estado como una suerte de juego de violencias contrapuestas” [it is unacceptable to try to justify state terrorism as a kind of game of oppositional violence].53 According to Novaro and Palermo, the democratized version of the doctrine of two demons adapted during the transition allowed vast sectors of society to articulate their experience as separate and excluded from the conflict. They write, “la demonización los eximía de responsabilidades, haciendo del terror estatal un fenómeno totalmente ajeno”

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[demonization made them exempt from responsibilities, making state terror a completely alien phenomenon].54 Luis Puenzo’s Oscar winning La historia oficial (The Official Story, 1985) exemplifies how cultural production advanced this discourse of exemption through portrayal of a middle-class history teacher who, as the film illustrates convincingly, remains unaware of the repression and disappearances until after the dictatorship, when she begins to question the true origins of her adopted daughter. This elaboration of the two demons under democracy is of interest to studies of theatre because it identifies a group of observers and consolidates a new kind of spectatorship predicated upon a sense of separateness from the past. Capable of embodying the past in the present self-consciously, theatre both sustains and suspends the inevitable separateness of the past in bringing together performers and spectators onstage to witness the resurrection of history onstage. Theatre during late dictatorship and the early years of the transition often replicated what Stanley Cohen has termed the “atrocity triangle”—the relationship between victims, perpetrators, and observers.55 For example, the first two cycles of the groundbreaking Teatro Abierto festival (Open Theatre, 1981–1985), conceived of as a collective theatrical act of resistance in defiance of the dictatorship, reproduced the relationship between victim and perpetrator onstage, shown emblematically in plays such as Gambaro’s Decir Sí (To Say Yes, 1981) and Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Tercero incluido (Third Included, 1981). Despite the festival’s success in validating Argentina’s national theatre tradition and nurturing a sense of solidarity and belonging among audience members, as Jean Graham-Jones notes, the festival ultimately was never able to overcome its binarism and could only define itself in opposition to the dictatorship.56 This notion of spectatorship constructed as a uniform community of observers, separate from a binary contained in the past, applies to other transitional spectacles as well, such as the generals’ trial. The legal scholar Jaime Malamud-Goti, who was advisor to President Alfonsín during the transition, criticizes this binary construction in human rights trials.57 He argues that “by depicting the world as consisting of the innocent and the guilty, the trials reproduced the authoritarian view that the world is split into allies and enemies.”58 Teatro Abierto and the generals’ trial had simultaneous and conflicting objectives: they replicated a rigid binary, but at the same time tried

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to contain it physically (onstage and in the courtroom) and dissolve it, symbolically, through uniform denunciation by spectators or arrival at a legal verdict. As Shoshana Felman remarks, trials represent conscious attempts to close and enclose traumatic events in the past while art “strives to transmit the force of the story that could not be told (or that failed to be transmitted or articulated) in the legal trial.”59 This book analyzes the impulse toward closure/enclosure of the past and proposes theatre as a genre that both satisfies and resists this impulse in offering both scenarios of closure, as well as presenting alternative models of aperture and modes for interacting with the past. Patricia Zangaro’s A propósito de la duda (With Regard to Doubt, 2000) is one such play that introduces original strategies to undermine the detachment of spectatorship. In contrast to Brecht’s Verfremdungeffekt, which makes spectator alienation a precondition for critical thinking of the events portrayed onstage, Zangaro’s play, conversely, makes self-analysis possible through a heightened feeling of attachment and identification between characters and spectators. A propósito de la duda inaugurated the theatre festival Teatro por la Identidad (Theatre for Identity), an annual theatrical event organized in collaboration with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, designed to raise awareness of approximately 500 children who had been stolen from their disappeared parents and given to families, which in most cases had collaborated with the military. During the first year, the festival organizers aimed to involve audiences in a very novel way by making it clear to young spectators between the ages of twenty and thirty that they could be children of the disappeared. The slogan of the festival, “Vos sabés quién sos?” (Do you know who you are?) chanted by the chorus throughout Zangaro’s play, reminds spectators of the premise of doubt and the identity uncertainty that not only served to strengthen bonds of identification between audience and performers, but made each spectator a potential protagonist in the continually evolving quest to facilitate restitution of the identities of the children of the disappeared. Featuring an escrache 60 onstage and erupting into a murga at the end of the play, A propósito incorporates practices utilized by H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, or Children for Identity and Justice, Against Forgetting and Silence), a group of youth formed in 1995 with the objectives of vindicating the struggles of their disappeared parents, searching for siblings appropriated by the military during the

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dictatorship and fighting against impunity.61 The festival uses theatre to introduce doubt but urges a transformation of consciousness and a deep questioning of identity that the theatrical experience does not contain temporally or spatially. Dramatists and theatre practitioners also incorporated a variety of technologies and modes of communication as strategies to involve spectators innovatively and to unsettle conventional divisions between performance and spectatorship. For example, the theatre group Los Macocos features the television as the main character of the play Los Albornoz (2001), their adaptation of the early-twentieth-century sainete, in which they explore the effects of economic hardship resulting from late Menemism on a middle-class Argentine family. Using their trademark dark humor, Los Macocos present the possibility of redemption and survival through participation in reality television. The play multiplies the levels and positions of spectatorship by splitting attention between the television, onstage characters, and individuals with cameramen mingling among the audience filming spectators in the auditorium. The presence of the cameras and the multiplication of images on the television screens in the auditorium dissolve the division between performance and spectatorship, mediating experience to raise questions of what constitutes the real and virtual. Throughout the book I rely on theatre reviews and interviews with spectators to gauge reactions to experimental theatrical techniques and examine their effects on communities of spectatorship. In 1992 Daniel Veronese and Emilio García Wehbi, in conjunction with the object theatre group El periférico de Objetos, staged their very loose adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffman’s The Sandman. The play presents silent puppeteers draped in black who manipulate antique porcelain dolls on a dimly lit stage to enact a sinister family drama. The main action is the repeated unearthing and burial of the dolls onstage in what resembles an enormous sandpit. Their actions sweep the sand into the air and engulf spectators in a hazy cloud, involving them palpably in the spectacle.62 To Veronese’s surprise, in reviews spectators insisted on interpreting allusions to Argentina’s recent past in the performance even in the absence of dialogue and any contextualizing props.63 Instead of alienating spectators from history and reinforcing the separation between past events and spectatorship, the use of puppets, lack of dialogue, and ritualistic elements prompted audiences to ask questions and express desire for historical contextualization.

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Chapter Summaries

This book integrates the work of well-established playwrights (e.g., Griselda Gambaro, Eduardo Pavlovsky, Ricardo Monti, and Roberto Cossa), in addition to a new generation of theatre practitioners who have not yet received comparable scholarly attention (e.g., Daniel Veronese, Los Macocos, Emilio García Wehbi, Lola Arias, Federico León, and Gladys Lizarazu). In general, these playwrights and practitioners do not stage their performances in commercial venues, though many of their plays have premiered in national theatres and have received considerable critical attention. Their works comprise a diverse repertoire of styles and genres, ranging from realism, expressionism, sainete, object theatre, and urban intervention. Chapter 1, “Transition and the Performance of Retroactive Justice,” focuses primarily on understanding Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa (1986) in the context of democratic transition and the emergence and intersection of national and international human rights discourse during this period. The chapter introduces the publication of Nunca Más (1984), the Trial of the Generals (1985), and the staging of Antígona furiosa as three significant transitional events, which, when considered together, lend original insight to the ways truth, law, and mourning were performed by the state, human rights groups, and artists during the transition. By establishing dialogue with human rights scholars, historians, and sociologists, I demonstrate how these transitional performances, scripts, and strategies were foundational in defining and shaping the prominent discourses on memory, human rights, and justice during the transitional period. Expanding upon Shoshana Felman’s distinction between literary and juridical justice, I ask how the staging of Antígona furiosa complements the law, or compensates for the law’s inadequacy in establishing retroactive justice.64 I turn to the embodied rituals of mourning and commemoration performed by Antígona onstage to respond to this inquiry. Chapter 2, “From Antigone to Orpheus: Alternative Myths and Figures of Mourning,” discusses more recent adaptations of the Antigone motif in a variety of plays (Alberto Ure’s Antígona, 1989; Griselda Gambaro’s Atando cabos [Tying Loose Ends, 1991]; La persistencia [Persistence, 2007], and Julia Solomonoff ’s film Hermanas [Sisters, 2005]), to examine the evolving tension between cultural production and memory politics as policies, attitudes, and perceptions

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of the dictatorship change over the course of the nineties and the early twenty-first century. In postdictatorial Argentina, male figures are notably absent amid abundant representations of mothers, sisters, and daughters performing the tasks of mourning and commemoration in the public sphere. Griselda Gambaro’s play La casa sin sosiego (The House Without Calm, 1992), an adaptation of the Orpheus myth, is a relatively unexplored yet pioneering postdictatorial work featuring as its main protagonist a father mourning his wife’s disappearance. I link the relative absence of male models for mourning in Argentina to the pervasive silence surrounding the Malvinas/Falklands War and the transitional government’s inability to carve out a space for the mourning of those killed during the war. This chapter contributes to the growing body of literature that seeks to assert and evaluate the heritage of the Malvinas/Falklands War as an essential, yet largely overlooked, component to understanding the gendering of human rights and memory politics in Argentina. Chapter 3, “The Performance of Confession Onstage and On the Stand,” examines the discourse of confession as it is performed onstage and on the witness stand from the mid-eighties to 2005. Eduardo Pavlovsky’s dramatic works of the eighties demonstrate an almost clinical curiosity in the subjectivity of the repressor figure. In discussing Pavlovsky’s performances of memory, omnipotence, and denial, I turn attention to his obsession with performing the perpetrator onstage and the role that confession plays in these performances. Pavlovsky’s characters, most notably in Potestad (1985), anticipate the cultivation of the repressor’s identity in public discourse during and after the dictatorship. The figure of the perpetrator gained newfound notoriety during the nineties, when a series of military and ex-police officers, then immune from prosecution, publicly confessed to their crimes in harrowing detail. I consider the violent insertion of these “unsettling accounts” of atrocity in the public sphere, the recycling of scripts of denial, and the relatively recent phenomenon of retraction of confessions in an era in which international law is redefining accountability and retroactive justice in a globalized framework.65 From Pavlovsky’s plays of the eighties and Luis César D’Angiolillo’s film adaptation of Potestad (2002) to Scilingo’s confession (1995) and retraction (2005), I analyze the techniques, scripts, and identity strategies that perpetrators (and actors) employ in their confessions and how these confessional performances and their reception change significantly

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in the context of expanding global accountability for crimes against humanity. Chapter 4, “Argentina’s Stages: Resting Places and Places of Unrest,” begins with a description of a performance of Griselda Gambaro’s La malasangre (Bad Blood, 1982), in which one of the main characters, who is clearly fashioned after the nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, provokes an uproar in the audience, causing proRosas nationalists to jump up from their seats, brandish weapons, and demand the performance to be stopped. Beginning with this detailed account of the incident serves to illustrate the imperfect fictionality of historical figures when they are revived as characters onstage, the instability of the division between performative and spectatorial space, and the polarization and emotional charge these onstage historical resurrections can produce. The chapter then turns to the almost simultaneous reburial of the nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in the ceremony of his repatriation in October 1989, and his subsequent resurrection as the main character in Ricardo Monti’s play Una pasión sudamericana (A South American Passion Play, 1989), premiered one month after the repatriation ceremony. I consider the efficacy of bodies as symbols of the past, the ethical dimension of these bodily substitutions, and potential psychosocial hypotheses that might shed light on the constant recycling of certain historical figures and tropes in postdictatorial performance. Chapter 5, “Argentina’s Middle Class: Paradigm of Crisis and Renewal,” demonstrates how the study of theatre contributes to understanding the relationship of Argentina’s middle class to spectatorship, consumerism, and urban spaces, particularly during the Menemist nineties. Argentine playwrights and performance artists have long utilized stage and urban space to explore the middle class’s relationship to marginalized groups, to imagine global and local ways of being, and to explore the relationship between the private and public sphere. The redrawing of urban space during the Menemist nineties corresponded to a redefining of the contours of the body politic in cultural production, which in theatre produced a wide range of onstage bodily metamorphoses. Artists dismember characters’ bodies, disperse them about the city, convert them into plastic, divide them into parts, and sell them on the international organ market. Staged as both the agents and recipients of history, these bodies enact change but also bear the scars of past violence and make visible the marginalization,

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poverty, and social injustice that burgeoned during the Menemist nineties. Roberto Cossa’s El saludador (1999) illustrates the downfall of the self-made man—the pillar of the middle class family—whose theatrical origins can be traced to turn-of-the-twentieth-century realism, early-century sainete criollo and grotesco criollo, and the sixties’ realism. As a counterpoint, Cristina Escofet’s Eternity Class (2000) offers a dark satire of the superficiality of the Menemist nineties, in which members of an upper-middle-class family elect to convert their bodies into plastic and seek membership to the exclusive/excluding global “eternity class.” Last, the play Los Albornoz (2001), by the theatre group Los Macocos, focuses on the role of media in its depiction of the demise of the middle-class family via reality television. In all of the works discussed in this chapter, characters undergo radical bodily transformations, which serve to either emphasize their downward mobility and reduced status as Menem’s “new poor” or, contrarily, empower characters by giving them the opportunity to construct their bodies, as in Eternity Class, as a way of asserting their membership to an exclusive, and exclusionary, class. Chapter 6, “Intergenerational Memory and Performative Acts of Recovery,” opens with a discussion of two of Argentina’s most significant sociotheatrical events: Teatro Abierto (1981–1985) and Teatro por la Identidad (2001–) separated by a “historical gap” and the arrival of a new generation.66 Both of these festivals participate in the recovery of community in the immediate wake and more distant aftermath of state-sponsored violence, though there are notable differences in the respective premises of this recovery outlined for each festival: while Teatro Abierto celebrates uniform consensus and affirmation of a sense of collective identity, Teatro por la Identidad encompasses audiences in a community of uniform doubt and underlying identity uncertainty. Doubt—one of the driving themes of the Teatro por la Identidad movement—has been a central motif in the Grandmothers’ “Right to Identity” Campaign, orchestrated to raise awareness of the approximately 500 children who were appropriated illegally under dictatorship and “adopted” by families, oftentimes complicit with the military regime. This chapter traces the evolution of this campaign in the Grandmothers’ collaboration with international organizations, human rights groups, scientists, psychologists, and artists to ensure the protection of their grandchildren’s right to identity, while in the

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process fostering their constitution as subjects of the law and protagonists in the narration of their life stories and relationships to their disappeared parents. Building on Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Elizabeth Jelin and Ana Amado’s observations on intergenerational memory, and Diana Taylor’s innovative genealogies of activism and the “DNA of performance,” I offer an in-depth analysis of Patricia Zangaro’s play A propósito de la duda, considered the inaugural play of the Teatro por la Identidad festival, to discuss theatre’s unique role in the fight for the right to identity, and the potential implications of the strategy of doubt in this fight. These plays, urban interventions, trials, and ceremonies comprise a repertoire of postdictatorial performance in Argentina, engaging themes of resistance, complicity, amnesty, impunity, and accountability. Constantly in flux, these definitions acquire new meaning as globalized economic, legal, and human rights paradigms steadily gain influence and unsettle the balance of power traditionally held by the state. A number of the plays discussed here question the “moralizing impulse” of narratives of reconciliation that arrived with the transition to democracy. These works, analzyed in conjunction with the performance of politics off-stage, lend a critical eye to the ease with which certain groups and individuals appropriate and hail these narratives in the attempt to justify impunity and promote political and economic agendas. As the following chapters will show, theatre and other forms of performance offer a meaningful framework in which to examine the (de)politicization of family discourse in relation to activism, the state, and the public sphere. They provide an extralegal forum to explore the limits and scope of retroactive justice and to draw attention to the fragility of humanity in the context of the nineties’ neoliberalism and beyond. In focusing a significant amount of attention on the work of a new generation of playwrights and artists, this book discusses the diverse ways in which this new group of artists is reconstructing an interrupted genealogy while establishing productive ruptures with the past, and looking toward the future.

Chapter

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Transition and the Performance of Retroactive Justice Commissions and trials can enact strategies for seeking truth, recognition, accountability, and justice in the wake of mass atrocity. In addition to providing rites of passage for transitional governments, commissions and trials participate in the rearticulation of public space, the reassertion of the jurisdiction of the law, and the return of authority to institutional bodies dismantled under repressive regimes. Commissions and trials are also spectacular, in the sense that their creation assumes an audience. By 2007, Argentina’s report of the commission findings, Nunca Más (Never Again, 1984), had sold over half a million copies, indicating a widespread national and international readership.1 In Argentina, over three hundred spectators witnessed the proceedings of the trial of the generals (1985) firsthand, while the general public watched short, muted clips of the trial on television. Over the years, reedited volumes, documentaries, films, and other forms of cultural production have revised and reinvented Nunca Más and the trial for new audiences. The constant reproduction of these emblematic events over the last 30 years has made them permanent interventions in Argentina’s transitional and postdictatorial memory politics. The point of departure of this chapter is spectatorship, specifically as it relates to transitional landmarks such as Nunca Más and the trial of the generals. Griselda Gambaro’s foundational staging of Antígona

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furiosa (1986), concurrent with these two state-commissioned initiatives, contributes an additional spectacular dimension to the symbolic reorganization of state, family, and memory politics during the transition. Recent scholarship on Nunca Más, the trial of the generals, and the performance of Antígona furiosa addresses the often overlooked role and impact of artistic production in the formation of transitional strategies (commissions, trials, activism) and their effectiveness in addressing past violence, restoring justice, and restructuring political, social, and legal relationships during periods of massive political, legal, and social change.2 Emphasizing the ceremonial or ritualistic elements present in the production and reception of these transitional acts foregrounds embodiment and discourses on bodily enactment in examining the transmission of testimony and justice. Moreover, an analysis of the reception of these rites engages recent studies on the construction of a discourse of spectatorship around the reproduction and mass dissemination of Nunca Más and the trials during the transition to democracy. Transitional Politics, Transitional Subjects

In December 1983, President Alfonsín established a truth commission (CONADEP)3 to gather testimony and evidence in the investigation of the state-organized disappearance of an estimated 30,000 individuals during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983).4 Ernesto Sábato, writer, activist, and head of the commission, hand-delivered the final report to Alfonsín in a moving ceremony on September 20, 1984, held at Argentina’s House of Government in front of the Plaza de Mayo, where 70,000 people had congregated to show their support. During the ceremony, the commission handed over 50,000 pages of documentation and Alfonsín announced that he would publish the final report and make it available to the general public. Titled Nunca Más, the publication of the final report compiles the testimonies of nearly 400 survivors and witnesses, provides demographic statistics and basic information on the disappeared, describes the modus operandi of disappearances, and identifies the location of the secret detention centers (Centros Clandestinos de Detención, CCDs).5 Published in November 1984, the first edition became an immediate best seller and sold out its 40,000 copies within two days of release (131). Subsequent publications reflect the book’s enduring presence in

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national consciousness and by November 2007, more than 500,000 copies had been sold, 45,000 of which were published and distributed outside Argentina (18). The human rights scholars Priscilla Hayner and Kathryn Sikkink concur that Argentina’s Nunca Más report is a foundational first in the now voluminous canon of truth commission reports generated worldwide in the eighties and nineties.6 And it is without a doubt that the publication of the Nunca Más report helped facilitate the trial of the generals in Argentina in1985. Truth commissions and trials often go hand in hand; as Sikkink and Booth Walling note, every Latin American country that has created a truth commission has also held a domestic trial.7 Commissions provide documentation of past abuses, disseminate information, and demand recognition of and responsibility for systematic violation of human rights. Ideally, trials then translate the commission findings into legal language, make formal accusations, determine legal accountability, and assign punishment.8 According to the legal scholar Carlos Nino, evidence provided by the commission proved to be decisive for the what Argentines would call “the Trial of the Century.”9 And in his insightful study on the political history of Nunca Más, Emilio Crenzel observes that the report matches each individual account to its legal case number thereby linking testimony and legal evidence in a concrete way.10 In addition, the report includes the filing dates of the writs of habeas corpus for the majority of the disappeared. In this subtle but profound indictment of the courts’ acquiescence under dictatorship, Nunca Más condemns the justice system’s complicity with the dictatorship but upholds and foreshadows the law as a powerful instrument of justice in the future trial (107). The trial of the generals began on April 22, 1985, in Buenos Aires at the Palace of Justice in downtown Tribunales. Although rarely used for trials because of its imposing size, the Palace of Justice proved to be an appropriate venue for the more than 300 people who filled the auditorium-sized courtroom daily for the nine-month duration of the trial.11 In her detailed study of the juridical rites of the trial, Ester Kaufman describes the organization of the physical space of the courtroom, the main actors and groups present, the delivery style of the jurists and witnesses, and the trial’s phases. Kaufman refers to everyone present in the courtroom during the trials as “actors” and divides them into permanent (estable) or occasional categories.12 The permanent

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actors included six judges, the prosecuting attorney and his alternate to represent the state, and the nine defense lawyers recruited from private firms to represent the nine generals. The occasional actors included the witnesses (830 in total belonging to the defense and the prosecution), special guests (104 individuals from human rights groups, political parties, and the armed forces), journalists (241 national and international), and the general public (80).13 According to Kaufman, “de algún modo, los actores estables representan al aparato judicial estatal, mientras que los ocasionales corporizan a la sociedad global” [in a certain sense, the permanent actors represent the state judicial apparatus, while the occasional ones embody global society] (10). As Kaufman’s observation shows, the trial provided the actors and stage space to carry out the performative restitution of the authority of juridical power, and the spectators to witness and embody this transfer of power. Spatial manipulation of the courtroom conveyed this redistribution of power. The “stage” of the courtroom consisted of three levels: six judges occupied the most elevated level. The second level seated the prosecution, where the witnesses gave their testimony and where the defense was permitted to present their cases. The third and lowest level is where the military generals and the defense lawyers were seated, along with the special guests and the journalists (10). Thus the judges represented the highest power in the ideological context of the transition, and the accused generals were designated the lowest level, in a position of clear subordination to the law. At the same time, the generals were placed at equal level and eye to eye with the majority of the trial spectators and the everyday judges of society at large. The presiding judges tried to create a controlled, solemn atmosphere to reflect the seriousness of the task at hand in order to encourage emotional restraint and deflect accusations from trial opponents who believed the proceedings would turn into a “circus.”14 To this end, strict rules were set in place to govern people’s behavior in the courtroom. For example, if trial observers had to leave the courtroom for some reason, they were not allowed to return; no cameras, microphones, large bags, posters, or recording equipment were permitted in the courtroom; silence was expected at all times, and observers were prohibited from displaying symbols or from expressing opinions or attitudes during the proceedings.15 Yet, beyond guiding reception and providing rules for spectatorship, these explicit instructions for

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behavior reveal a performative aspect of the trials that transcends the mere question of decorum. What are trials of this kind and stature supposed to demonstrate, if not guilt or innocence? Hannah Arendt considers this question in her detailed account of the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann held in Israel in 1961: In Israel, as in most other countries, a person appearing in court is deemed innocent until proved guilty. But in the case of Eichmann this was an obvious fiction. If he had not been found guilty before he appeared in Jerusalem, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, the Israelis would never have dared, or wanted, to kidnap him.16

In Argentina, none other than the military generals most nurtured this notion of preexisting guilt and indicted themselves early on through the creation of decrees designed to portray their actions as service to the nation (The Final Document/El Documento Final, 1983),17 to grant themselves full immunity from prosecution (The Law of National Pacification/La Ley de Pacificación Nacional, 1983), or to destroy all textual documentation relating to military repression.18 With the guilty verdict a foregone conclusion for many, the trial proceeded to demonstrate other major cornerstone discourses of the transitional period. The nine-month duration of the trial coincided symbolically with the gestation of a new national order, restoring civil law as the most viable paradigm for confronting the past and articulating a new relationship to the future.19 The reassertion of the law in Argentine politics and culture generated innovative ways of envisioning and performing nation and citizenship. In her book Transitional Justice, Ruti Teitel writes, “The conception of justice in periods of political change is extraordinary and constructivist: It is alternately constituted by, and constitutive of, the transition.”20 With regard to this constitutive role of justice, Inés González Bombal similarly remarks that the trial had less to do with the practice of the law and more to do with the reconstitution of a subject of law.21 Both Nunca Más and the trial upheld a universal subject of human rights in favor of a local, historically grounded, and politically affiliated subject: Crenzel explains that the descriptions of the disappeared in Nunca Más provided basic information, including

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name, age, gender, and profession, but never, or very rarely, included references to political militancy:22 De este modo, la CONADEP confronta el crimen de la desaparición restituyendo la humanidad de los desaparecidos al presentar sus nombres, edades, sexos, actividades laborales o profesionales. Esta restitución asume la forma de una humanización abstracta, que presenta sus vidas genéricas, y eclipsa su condición de seres históricos concretos, sus vidas políticas, esto es, aquellos atributos que, precisamente, recuerdan los enfrentamientos que dividieron a la sociedad argentina. (112) [In this way, CONADEP confronts the crime of disappearance through restitution of the humanity of the disappeared in presenting their names, ages, sex, and work or professional activities. This restitution assumes the form of abstract humanization, which presents their lives as generic and eclipses their condition as concrete historical, political beings; in other words, those precise conditions that recall the conflicts that divided Argentine society.]

This emphasis on the idea of basic humanity and the depoliticized subject permeated the trial as well. Months before the trial began, the prosecution began examining the findings of CONADEP. As Crenzel notes, lawyers selected cases in which the victims were not associated with political militancy and the prosecution summarily objected to inquiries into the political motivations of the witnesses and the disappeared.23 Shifting Local and Global Rights Paradigms

Elizabeth Jelin observes that all of the major human rights organizations in Argentina existed before the dictatorship, with the exception of CELS24 and the groups formed by family members of the disappeared, such as the Madres and the Abuelas.25 According to Sikkink, Argentina’s strong tradition of domestic human rights organizations provided a solid foundation for the country’s pioneering role in “global human rights protagonism.”26 Also, most of the basic international human rights treaties, including the American Convention on Human Rights (1978), were in place by the late seventies, though, as Sikkink indicates, “both in the international and regional cases, the legal and institutional framework was still quite inert” (2). In Argentina, awareness of global human rights grew over the course of the dictatorship as a result of collaborative work between Argentine and international

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human rights lawyers and activists. As González Bombal suggests, this new juridical consciousness emerged in Argentina at a moment when local access to the law was blocked and Argentine human rights groups turned to international organizations for legal recourse.27 One concrete example of these collaborations came in 1979, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visited Argentina to assess the human rights crisis, meet with leaders, and collect testimony. The IACHR’s condemning report on Argentina was the first document to make the recommendation of trials for those accused of human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship (4). In the early eighties, Alfonsín’s policies paved the way for envisioning a more active role and application of international legal and human rights treaties in transitional Argentina. Not only did he decree Argentina’s first truth commission and make possible the trial of the generals, he also ratified the American Convention on Human Rights (which stipulated acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights), the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Additionally, according to Carlos Nino, in a speech given at the Argentine Lawyers Federation28 in August 1983, Alfonsín outlined five basic philosophical tenets of human rights, one of which Nino summarizes as the following: “Como preocupación de la comunidad internacional, la defensa de derechos humanos trasciende las fronteras nacionales” [As a concern of the international community, the defense of human rights transcends national borders].29 Thus the trial of the generals in the context of this new, executively endorsed transnational jurisdiction was also a trial (as in a tentative first) of a newly championed subject of the law based on the concept of universal human rights. Though problematic, depoliticizing the victims and universalizing the discourse of human rights ensured the efficiency of the trial proceedings and turned attention away from charged local political views. As Feld observes, the judges were concerned about the impact the enormous emotional trauma would have on the trial, while the government remained wary of incensing the military.30 After nine months of testimony, arguments, and deliberation, the final verdict and sentences were handed down.31 The live broadcast of the sentence is significant because it marks the only time during the entire duration of the trial that televised coverage included audio and was transmitted

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directly (55). Mass transmission of this audiovisual spectacle sent a clear and immediate message that juridical authority had been reinstated (at least for the time being) and the state had exchanged its alliance with the military for solidarity with the victims of the dictatorship. Moreover, the broadcast illustrates a shift in focus from the politics of documentation and denunciation to the politics of representation and transmission of the past. Claudia Feld’s study on the audiovisual documentation of the trial of the generals and its permutations over the course of the postdictatorship period details the complex interplay between memory politics, power struggles, and the editing and reproduction of the audiovisual archive. Feld identifies and analyzes major adaptations in the production of four different documentaries made from the 530 hours of video footage of the trial from 1987 to 1998. As she notes, the first documentary was titled Señores, ¡de pie! (Gentlemen, Stand!) and consisted of twelve hours of video footage to be divided into two-hour segments. The vision of the production team, influenced by the dramatist Carlos Somigliana, was that the facts of the trial would speak for themselves; there was no addition of voice-over, and external elements were limited to the incorporation of a couple of photographs, titles, and subtitles.32 Although completed in December 1986, the airing of the documentary was delayed several times until it was postponed indefinitely after the Carapintada military uprisings of Semana Santa (Holy Week) in April 1987 (70).33 Subsequent versions were condensed considerably, and particularly the third and fourth productions showed the effort to recontextualize the trial historically (81–118). Finally, in 1998 the fourth version of the video aired on television for the first time with audio as part of the documentary “ESMA: El día del Juicio” (ESMA: The Day of Judgment/The Trial, 123).34 This most recent version, viewed by over two million people, shows the continuing trend to commercialize the documentary and provide a sensationalized product for viewers (123). Feld observes that in this version, the re-created scenes are indistinguishable from the actual footage of the trial. She offers the example of the day of the sentencing of the generals in which the video alternates between images of the presiding judge León Carlos Arslanián reading the sentence and the faces of Videla and Massera (though absent on the day of sentencing), as if they were present in the courtroom listening to the verdict (134).

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The gradual historical recontextualization Feld identifies in the reedited versions of the audiovisual archive of the trial are both an effect of and a response to the limitations of the law as an instrument for the transmission of knowledge and comprehensive evaluation of the dictatorship period. The constant reproduction of the trial and Nunca Más in film and in print continued to condition citizens in the role of spectatorship after the transition, whether as observers of the trial or readers of the final truth commission report. During the dictatorship, overdetermined spectacles of military power and threats of violence instilled fear in citizens by creating an environment in which, as Diana Taylor observes, “people dared not be caught seeing.”35 During transition, this diverted gaze refocuses and locks on key democratic spectacles such as the trial of the generals and Nunca Más, facilitating the renewal of democratic citizenship through new modes of spectatorship. Reproduction of the trial in different versions and forms preserves memory of the event in the minds of older generations and teaches younger generations about the event for the first time. Another aim of reproduction is to help consolidate democracy tangibly through the creation of material evidence of the transition. At the same time, constant technological reimagining of the event runs contrary to the most fundamental objective of a trial, which is to provide a verdict and closure to a case. In her book The Juridical Unconscious, Shoshana Felman analyzes the relationship between law and art in relation to historic trials and the representation of mass trauma and concludes: A trial is presumed to be a search for the truth, but, technically, it is a search for a decision, and thus, in essence, it seeks not simply truth but a finality: a force of resolution. A literary text is, on the other hand, a search for meaning, for expression, for heightened significance, and for symbolic understanding.36

In Argentina, likewise, the trial of the generals attempts to close the case and enclose it in the past, but the steady increase in cultural production addressing dictatorship since the transition offers proof that a legal verdict did not enclose the past efficiently and “throw a bridge over the abyss” (95). Felman asserts that while the law seeks to establish distance from that which is expressionless, art is able to bring us

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closer (107). Felman distinguishes between literary and legal justice, a particularly useful distinction for assessing the relationship between art and the law during Argentina’s democratic transition. Forms of legal and literary justice correspond to separate jurisdictions, lexicons, and strategies available to diverse groups and individuals confronting a traumatic past. For example, what kind of justice can Gambaro’s 1986 staging of Antígona furiosa provide that five hundred hours of testimony and the declaration of a guilty verdict in the trial of the generals in 1985 cannot?37 How does the staging of Antígona furiosa complement the law, or compensate for the law’s inadequacy in establishing retroactive justice? Or, do the objectives of the theatrical staging of Argentina’s dictatorial past differ entirely? The state-initiated trial of the generals and artist-envisioned Antígona furiosa share several significant features and objectives. Both offer examples of embodied testimony as framed by legal and theatrical discourse, respectively, and both events require the presence of an audience and draw attention to the role of spectatorship in relation to testimony. Also, both participate in the reconstruction of public space during the transition, on the one hand through the restitution of due process of the law and its application in the courtroom, and on the other through the resumption of noncommercial theatre activity in Buenos Aires theatre houses. Furthermore, the trial and the performance bring together national and international paradigms in their definitions of subjectivity and justice, whether through collaboration with international human rights organizations to expand legal jurisdiction, or through adaptation of the global Antigone trope. In addition, both privilege representations of family in settling claims of justice and expressing mourning. Finally, both the trial and Antígona furiosa question the relationship between the state, mourning, and the law, and both reflect the tension between the desire for closure and its impossibility. Taking Felman’s argument into account, the following analysis of Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa examines not only the ways in which art brings audiences closer to understanding the traumatic event but also the ways in which art consciously creates distance from the event. What is the impact of art’s ability to narrow and broaden this gap between trauma and its recognition on the collective experience of spectatorship? Theatre offers a unique form of testimony that complements other transitional strategies, such as the truth commission

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report Nunca Más and the trial of the generals, to evaluate the past and, in Stanley Cohen’s words, to convert “the information exposed about the past into modes of current acknowledgement.”38 At the same time, however, theatre makes visible the limits of these strategies, while recognizing its own set of limits, as well as the political and ethical implications of representing past trauma. Antígona furiosa (1986)

Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa premiered in September 1986 at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires. Laura Yusem, the director and also a classically trained dancer, sought to create a version of Antigone inspired by dance to commemorate the work of the Madres of Plaza de Mayo, and she asked Gambaro if she would write the text. Yusem and the actress and dancer Bettina Muraña rehearsed for two years, from 1984 to 1986, before premiering the play.39 Stage designer and Yusem’s longtime collaborator Graciela Galán designed a towering pyramid-shaped cage fashioned from criss-crossing iron bars in which Muraña enacts her role as Antígona onstage. In Antígona furiosa Gambaro draws on the Sophocles text but reduces the number of main characters and condenses the action into one act. The three main characters in Gambaro’s version are Antígona (who occasionally assumes Hemón’s identity and recites his lines) and Corifeo and Antinoo, who play the roles of the chorus, the sentry, Tiresias, and also double as two average porteños having coffee at a café. Corifeo represents Creonte when he dons the sculpted shell, resembling the breastplate, sleeves, and helmet from a suit of armor, designed exclusively for the play by the sculptor Juan Carlos Distéfano. Antigona’s task in Gambaro’s play, as in Sophocles’ text, is to perform the burial and commemorative funeral rites for her brother, Polinices, killed in battle alongside his opponent and brother, Eteocles. Creonte dictates that Eteocles will be buried and honored by the city, whereas Polinices, who opposed Creonte’s regime, will remain unburied, and unmourned, his body exposed to the elements. Antígona disobeys Creonte’s decree and buries Polinices. For her transgression, she is punished and condemned to death by Creonte and banished to a cave, where she takes her own life. Antígona furiosa has inspired an impressive body of critical literature. Scholars of Argentine theatre history tend to contextualize

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the play among other dramatic works and theatrical currents in Argentina. Osvaldo Pellettieri maintains that Antígona furiosa belongs to the ideological continuum of plays produced as part of the Teatro Abierto festival (Open Theatre, 1981–1985).40 Pellettieri and Ana Laura Lusnich view Gambaro’s Antígona as an heiress to Dolores from La malasangre (1982) and Margarita 2 from Real Envido (Royal Gambit, 1983) in her newfound capacity to rebel against patriarchy.41 Mirta Arlt argues that the Antigone trope runs through the entirety of Gambaro’s dramatic canon.42 Most recently, and significant for studies of postdictatorial theatre, Susana Tarantuviez observes that beginning with La malasangre and Antígona furiosa, the silences so characteristic of Gambaro’s dramaturgy represent an awakening of consciousness that occurs only after the denunciation of authoritarianism.43 Scholars who are more interested in studying Antígona furiosa in the context of transition and postdictatorship tend to focus on the playwright’s adaptation of the Greek text to the specific social and political climate of Argentina in 1986. Often considered Gambaro’s most significant innovation is the decision to use Antígona’s death as a point of departure for her play. In the opening scene Antígona appears lifeless with the noose still around her neck. After a few moments, she stirs gently, removes the noose, and comes back to life, only to distract spectators momentarily in a brief impersonation of Hamlet’s Ophelia.44 Critics have alternately interpreted Gambaro’s introduction of a circular structure as reinforcement of Antígona’s death complex, already present in Sophocles or, contrarily, as defiance of death in the promise of her cyclical resurrection to life at the beginning of the play. Ana Puga, in arguing the latter, observes that Gambaro endows her Antígona with supernatural powers by giving her the ability to remove the noose from her neck and come back to life.45 In this way, too, Gambaro responds to the Madres’ demands for their children returned to them alive (Aparición con vida [Appearance/Returned Alive]) by allowing Antígona (who alternately evokes the disappeared and the mother/sister of the disappeared) to come back to life to testify to what happened. In Gambaro’s play, Antígona offers the testimony that neither Nunca Más nor the trial of the generals could provide: that is, the most essential and impossible testimony of all, from those who disappeared during the dictatorship. Shoshana Felman writes, “What is to be heard in court is precisely what cannot be articulated in legal language.”46 In framing Antígona’s supernatural return from death,

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theatre provides language for articulating what cannot be heard in court. In this way, audiences may be brought closer to testimony of the disappeared in theatre, though at the center is still the abyss, in Felman’s words, that cannot be bridged by law or art (94–95). Silvia Pellarolo observes that in making death the point of departure of the play, Gambaro introduces the dimension of mourning.47 Indeed the play begins with the knowledge of death that is so essential to the mourning process. In their essay on the relationship between special cases of mourning and this need for knowledge, Julia Braun de Dunayevich and María Lucila Pelento write, Mientras en un duelo en condiciones habituales se desarrolla a partir de un saber permitido y facilitado desde lo social, los duelos que caen bajo la figura de la desaparición están en cambio obstaculizados, pues deben desarrollarse bajo el peso de un saber distorsionado impuesto por el poder genocida.48 [While the process of mourning under habitual conditions starts with knowledge that is permitted and facilitated socially, in the cases of the disappeared the process of mourning is impeded because of the distortion of knowledge imposed by genocidal power.]

As stated earlier, Antígona at times represents both the disappeared and mother/sister of the disappeared. The beginning of the play features her reappearance, and the entire play becomes her testimony of disappearance. Later, on hearing Creonte’s decree, Antígona proclaims, “No estaré con los humanos ni con los que murieron, no se me contará entre los muertos ni entre los vivos. Desapareceré del mundo, en vida” [I will be neither with the humans nor with those who died, I will neither be counted among the dead nor the living. I will disappear from the world, in life] (210). Although in this passage Antígona represents the disappeared and the individual to be mourned, throughout most of the play Antígona assumes the role of mourner for her lost brother, Polinices. In her comparative analysis of Sophocles’ and Gambaro’s Antigones, Laura Mogliani observes that Gambaro introduces elements onstage that go against ancient Greek conventions for theatre, as seen in the sonorous and embodied representation of the battle, Antígona walking and falling as if surrounded by cadavers, and the burial ritual of Polinices.49 The emphasis on embodied representation and nonverbal language—clearly a tribute to Yusem and her desire to create a

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work of “danza-teatro” (dance theatre)—has inspired critical commentary by Diana Talyor, Marla Carlson, and Nieves Martínez-Olcóz on the representation of Antígona’s body as a site of violence.50 While Sophocles’ Antigone buries Polynices offstage, Antígona buries him onstage. Both the scene in which Antígona first recognizes the body of her brother onstage (represented by a shroud) and the subsequent one, in which she enacts the commemorative rites, are viscerally powerful and constitute the emotional climax in the play:51 ANTÍGONA: También se encadena la memoria. Esto no lo sabe Creonte ni su ley. Polinices, seré césped y piedra. No te tocarán los perros ni las aves de rapiña. (Con un gesto maternal). Limpiaré tu cuerpo, te peinaré. (Lo hace). Lloraré, Polinices . . . lloraré . . . ¡Malditos! [Ceremonia, escarba la tierra con las uñas, arroja polvo seco sobre el cadáver, se extiende sobre él. Se incorpora y golpea, rítmicamente, una contra otra, dos grandes piedras, cuyo sonido marca una danza fúnebre.]52 [ANTÍGONA: Memory also forms a chain. Creonte and his law do not know this. Polinices, I will be grass and stone. The dogs and vultures will not touch you (with a maternal gesture). I will wash your body, I will comb your hair (which she does). I will cry, Polinices . . . I will cry . . . Damn them!] [Ceremony, she grasps at the earth with her fingernails, she sprinkles dry dust on his body, she covers his body with her own. She sits up and with two large stones strikes the rhythm of a funeral march.]

The burial ceremony Antígona performs onstage takes place in silence. Her body is the locus of this commemorative scene in which gestural, rhythmical movement conveys meaning. In establishing bonds of identification, audiences respond to visual and auditory cues and verbal and nonverbal language. In his review of the play, Osvaldo Quiroga notes, “Mucho se ha dado sobre la importancia del cuerpo en el proceso creador del actor. Pero habría que agregar que cada movimiento en el espacio es, también, un movimiento en la mente del espectador” [Much has been written about the importance of the body in the actor’s creative process. But one should add that each movement in space is also a movement in the spectator’s mind].53 Reception and identification in theatre involve a commingling of sensorial experiences. Herbert Blau refers to the “synesthetic transference” that occurs in spectators “whose eyes look upon what . . . comes in through the ears, as if it were created by the Logos” (43). And Beatriz Trastoy and

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Perla Zayas de Lima comment, “Las investigaciones iniciales en torno de la kinésica descubrieron que los sistemas de movimiento corporal eran análogos a los ritmos lingüísticos” [Early investigations into body language discovered that systems of bodily movement were analogous to linguistic rhythms].54 The translation of embodied action into meaning for spectators produces an “act of transfer”55 that transforms the onstage commemoration of Antígona’s lost brother into a collective act of mourning that envelops and unites the audience. Antígona performs acts of recognition and rites of commemoration onstage that could not have been and still, in many cases, cannot be fulfilled because of missing information or the lack of a body. According to Pauline Boss, “Of all the losses experienced in personal relationships, ambiguous loss is the most devastating because it remains unclear, indeterminate.”56 In No habrá flores en la tumba del pasado Ludmila da Silva Catela describes how the lack of a body in the case of the disappeared ones affects the rituals of mourning. She refers to disappearance as a form of inconclusive death; the time and space that is usually delimited and reserved for mourning extends indefinitely as family members continue to wait and hope for their loved ones to return.57 She asks, “Con la falta del cuerpo, locus esencial de los rituales de la muerte, ¿qué espacios son recreados para dar cuenta de esa ruptura?” [Without a body, essential locus for the rituals of death, what spaces are recreated to address this rupture?](114). The arts provide a creative channel for the energy and emotion that could not be invested in the “normal” processes of mourning, contingent upon knowledge of death and burial. Da Silva Catela refers to the “salidas creativas” (creative outlets) that are essential for individuals and society to confront the absence created by disappearance. These creative endeavors, to an extent, “combaten la muerte o al menos la atenúan, la controlan, la tornan reversible, culturalmente modelable, aprehensible” [combat death, or at least attenuate death, control death, make it reversible, culturally malleable, apprehensible] (148). One particularly powerful example of this kind of artistic manifestation began in Argentina in 1983 with the appearance of line drawings of human-sized silhouettes of bodies on white paper pasted on building walls throughout Buenos Aires and other cities as part of an urban intervention called the “siluetazo.” On each drawing was the name and date of the disappeared person. According to Da Silva Catela, the presence of these silhouettes

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in 1983 presented the new democratic government with an enormous question mark, prompting recognition of and response to the violation and erasure of identity of the disappeared (134). Several years later, Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa appeared as another manifestation of a “salida creativa,” combating death through creative expression, providing knowledge and recognition of death, and representing the rite of burial, elements identified by Da Silva Catela as essential in completing the mourning process. In her book Mourning and the Law, Gillian Rose writes, “Mourning draws on transcendent but representable justice, which makes the suffering of immediate experience visible and speakable.”58 The representability of justice returns the discussion to the courtroom and the stage as separate venues for making testimony visible and speakable. Feld argues that because of the historic nature of the trial of the generals, the judges allowed the witnesses to continue to narrate their testimony long after the necessary proof was established.59 At the same time, as mentioned earlier, the judges were under substantial pressure from the government and military to contain the emotional outpouring of the proceedings. González Bombal notes the following: Sentimientos de angustia, sufrimientos, etc, resultan inconmensurables a los efectos de la prueba jurídica y fueron interrumpidos por la intervención judicial que marcó el itinerario del testimonio. Sin embargo, fue justamente esa oscilación entre el relato y su corte lo que provocó la máxima afectación en los espectadores: la insinuación de una experiencia que desplegaba en su totalidad hubiese sido imposible de contar y tal vez de escuchar.60 [Feelings of anguish, suffering, etc., were incommensurable with the objectives of juridical proof and were interrupted by judicial intervention, which served to move testimony along. However, it was precisely this oscillation between the narrative and its rupture that provoked the greatest emotional impact on spectators: the insinuation that an experience, revealed in its totality, would have been impossible to tell, and perhaps to listen to.]

The trial permitted testimony in excess of the law as long as it took on the form of verbal narrative. However, the nonverbal expression of emotion was considered a threat to the integrity of the proceedings and was abruptly cut off. The limitations placed on nonverbal language in the trial reveal an uneasiness with the body, which finds expression in the heightened tension between bodies and narration in theatre

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during the postdictatorship period.61 Antígona furiosa complements the trial by shifting attention to nonverbal language and the embodiment of testimony and mourning. Still, the play by no means strives to overcome the tension between the body and narration, tension that is channeled creatively in the collaboration between Gambaro, a playwright known for her respect for the written text, and Yusem, a dancer who wanted to imagine an Antigone through body movement. And even though the commemorative burial rites onstage facilitate collective mourning and gesture toward the possibility of closure, spoken dialogue interjects to prevent this reading. In Gambaro’s play, as in the Greek version, the guards interrupt Antígona and prohibit her from completing her brother’s burial. In the Sophoclean version, the interruption by the guards recalls the state’s role in monitoring public practices of mourning in place in Athens at the time of the premiere of Antigone between 442 and 441 b.c. During sixth century b.c. in Athens, excessive displays of public mourning for relatives were controlled in order to contain the influence of Aristocratic families and shift loyalty from the family to the new city-state.62 In her discussion of the law, the state, and funeral rites in Ancient Athens, Olga Taxidou writes, In most readings, the curtailment of public death rites brings with it the rise of the city-state. Indeed, this is a fertile encounter, one that sees the development of the newly formed city-state, the soon-to-become democratic polis, as inextricably tied to the negotiation of public mourning and lamentation. (173)

Taxidou asserts that “tragedy has always been about democracy. This notion of democracy, however, one that we still inhabit today, is not simply about progress, visibility and civilisation, but also about violence, exclusion and barbarism” (8). And the classics scholar Simon Goldhill reinforces this historical continuity when he writes, “The scripts of Greek tragedy inevitably reflect their genesis in a society that is quite alien to us—but also frighteningly familiar.”63 As mentioned, in transitional Argentina the state’s role in the negotiation of mourning is present in the monitoring of displays of lamentation in the trial of the generals, a “muting of the passions,” which, as Feld notes, is implemented most literally in the daily televised clips of the trial proceedings that were broadcast without audio.64

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Often overlooked in studies of mourning in contemporary adaptations of Antigone is that in the Greek text she is not only mourning her brother, Polynices, but also her father, Oedipus, and her mother, Jocasta.65 Taxidou argues that in mourning, Antigone continues to support the house of the father and that “out of all the positions she occupies—that of the man, brother, father even—the one she refuses to occupy is the position of the mother” (24). From the burial scene in Antígona furiosa, however, we see Gambaro has inserted the ‘gesto materno’ (maternal gesture) into the didascalias to enhance identification between Antígona and the Madres. Gambaro’s addition is a tribute to the Madres, even when taking into account the group’s very unique political position regarding their disappeared loved ones. Taylor discusses the gradual politicization and eventual splintering of the Madres organization, which led the Madres to break away from the Línea Fundadora (Foundational Line) in 1986.66 And according to Jelin, while during their first years of activism the Madres demanded the return of their loved ones “Vivos o muertos” (Alive or dead), their slogan later became “Aparición con Vida” (Appearance/Returned Alive) as of 1980,67 adopted in defiance of officials who began to announce in public that the disappeared were dead. Such remarks made the Madres adhere even more forcefully to the slogan since, they argued, nobody had told them what had happened to their sons and daughters, and they would thus continue to maintain that they were alive.68 In the early years of the transition, the Madres were disappointed that Alfonsín’s government had not established a parliamentary commission with subpoena power to investigate the disappeared, and they felt that too many concessions were being made to the military, in general.69 Furthermore, Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Madres, states that in the first few months Alfonsín was in office, several Madres began receiving notifications that the remains of their loved ones had been discovered in mass graves and cemeteries, but that no explanations were given, or that they were given the standard response that they had been killed in military confrontations (383). Bonafini maintains that the Madres had to make the very difficult decision to reject the exhumation of mass graves, “porque si aceptábamos la exhumación de esos muertos, que decían que eran muertos en enfrentamiento, si aceptábamos esa muerte sin que nadie nos dijera quién los mató, sin que nadie nos dijera quién los secuestró, sin que nadie nos dijera nada,

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era volverlos a asesinar” [because if we accepted the exhumation of the dead, the ones they said had been killed in combat, if we accepted that death, without anyone telling us who killed them, without telling us who kidnapped them, without anyone telling us anything, it was like killing them again] (383). According to Jelin, this political stance was the most radical taken by any Argentine human rights organization during the transition.70 It expresses the Madres’ decision to sacrifice the possibility of personal mourning and commemoration of their loved ones in order to advance their pursuit of legal justice and to demand official recognition and acknowledgment of criminal responsibility from the military. Taylor argues that the Madres were trapped by scripts that insisted on casting women eternally in roles of self-abnegation.71 Indeed, Gambaro shows that she is conscious of the burden of the Antigone trope, in addition to its merit as an allegory of resistance and justice, and she weaves in strategies for escaping charges of misrepresentation accordingly. Gambaro’s task of creating an Argentine Antigone required a nearly impossible negotiation between the Greek text, a weighty trope, audience expectations, and the specific politics of the Madres in 1986. I would add that behind this negotiation lie the anxiety of subjectivity and the tension between the universal subject of human rights and the localized political subject constructed in Nunca Más and the trial of the generals. An excerpt from the playbill offers a glimpse of this anxiety: “Esta ‘Antígona furiosa’ no es una adaptación ni la versión de la Antígona de Sófocles” [This “Antígona furiosa” is neither an adaptation nor a version of Sophocles’ Antigone], a sentiment later echoed by Gambaro in an interview with Reina Roffé in which she states, “Es y no es exactamente la Antígona de Sófocles, desde luego. Mis obras pueden transcurrir en la Grecia antigua o en la Francia de 1700, pero la mirada es la mirada de una argentina, porque los datos de mi experiencia son los de la realidad de mi país”72 [It is and is not exactly Sophocles’ Antigone, after all. My plays can transpire in ancient Greece or in the 1700s in France, but the gaze is always Argentine, because my experience is grounded in the reality of my country]. Here, phrases like “neither nor” and “is and is not” reflect intertextual tension between an abstract, philosophical Antigone and a political, historically grounded one. In many ways, Antigone is the ideal figure to exemplify the displacement of political and historical specificity in the consolidation

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of a universal subject of human rights. Classics scholars place importance on Aristotle’s Poetics (350 b.c.) in initiating the transformation of Antigone into a subject of philosophy, given that, as Charles Segal argues, Aristotle’s Poetics demonstrates “the almost total disregard of the ritual dimension of tragedy, the disdain for theatrical spectacle, and the view of tragedy as exhibiting universals.”73 Antigone’s place in philosophical discourse has been a source of great interest to scholars over time, as Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, Irigaray, Steiner, Butler, and others have shown. Steiner asks, “Why are the ‘Antigones’ truly éternelles and immediate to the present?”74 And Lacan ponders rather abstractly Antigone’s “unbearable splendor.”75 Edith Hall reminds us that philosophical abstraction was necessary for tragedy to be appropriated globally.76 Yet theatrical adaptations of Antigone— from Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, Athol Fugard, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Griselda Gambaro, to the performance group Yuyachkani, and countless others—rely on the audience’s ability to construct meaning through local contextualization. Gambaro’s response to Antigone’s split identity—as an abstract, philosophical ideal, on the one hand, and a mourner in a local context, on the other—is to fracture it even further (and perhaps liberate it from the binary) through intertextual strategies and innovations in character portrayal. As mentioned earlier, Antigone appears in the opening scene wearing a sullied white gown and a wreath of wilted white flowers. Seated at the café, Corifeo utters mockingly to Antinoo: “¿Quién es ésa? ¿Ofelia?” [Who is that? Ophelia?].77 Further on Antinoo cites Rubén Darío’s Sonatina to belittle Antígona’s lineage: “Está triste, ¿qué tendrá la princesa?” [She is sad, what troubles the princess?] (204). Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and Darío’s princess are all interchangeable to Corifeo and Antinoo, who will continue to misrecognize her in a strategic exercise of power. Magda Castellví deMoor comments on Gambaro’s parody of the Greek myth, and Silvia Pellarolo identifies the deconstruction of the tragic discourse through the farcical language of Corifeo and Antinoo, two typical porteños and contemporaries of the audience.78 Through Corifeo and Antinoo’s frequent acts of misrecognition, Gambaro shifts attention away from the Antigone trope and has us focus instead on this identity slippage as it relates to the exhibition of power. Corifeo and Antinoo clearly hold the upper hand in naming and misnaming, and their conscious and parodic misrecognition reflects,

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more insidiously, their refusal to acknowledge Antigone’s suffering and demands for justice. Gambaro employs competing strategies to undermine characters’ fixed identities in ways that do not disempower Antigone or reinforce patriarchy. Taylor suggests that Gambaro injects women’s activism into the script by having Antígona absorb Hemón’s character and allowing her to recite his lines.79 Pellarolo proposes that Antígona’s incorporation of Hemón allows her to transform Antigone’s steadfast discourse of resignation to death into fury.80 Endowing Antígona with Hemón’s fury opens the text up in creative ways. No longer “a statue hewn in the hardest rock,” Antígona’s character acquires multidimensionality and complexity through Gambaro’s blending of characters.81 While Antígona’s character absorbs others with centripetal force, Creonte’s character undergoes centrifugal fragmentation in Gamabro’s play, the representation of his power separated from the actor’s body in the form of the removable shell. Marla Carlson interprets this removability as the diffusion of authoritarian power: “By making power’s body concrete in the form of a carapace to be taken on and off, Antígona furiosa moves in the direction of returning power to its proper place as a changing property of social relations.”82 Conversely, Gambaro’s refusal of a “solid embodiment of the locus of power” may also be interpreted as a critique of the lack of accountability in those individuals who, in power during the military dictatorship, chose to shed their roles and responsibility after the transition to democracy, like the easily removable sculpted shell. This second interpretation seems more fitting, given Gambaro’s much more sinister depiction of Creonte, who till the end refuses to accept accountability for his crimes and the tragic outcome as he parodies allegations made by others: CORIFEO: ¡Los perdono! ¡No saben lo que hacen! Pretenden condenarme a mí, que di mi hijo, mi esposa, al holocausto. Antígona, que atrajiste tantos malos sobre mi cabeza y mi casta, ¡te perdono! ANTINOO: (teatral): ¡Bravo! (Sale el Corifeo de la carcasa, saluda)83 [CORIFEO: I forgive you. They do not know what they are doing. They think they can condemn me for sending my son and wife to this holocaust. Antígona, you who delivered so many evils upon me and my family. I forgive you!

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ANTINOO: (theatrically) Bravo! (Corifeo removes the shell and takes a bow).]

As Annette Wannamaker observes, Creonte undermines his own statement of recognition and apology through his ironic delivery.84 Compare Gambaro’s portrayal of an unrepentant and insouciant Creonte to Sophocles’ Creon at approximately the same point in the play, when he acknowledges responsibility for his wife Eurydice’s death: CREON : And the guilt is all mine— can never be fixed on another man, no escape for me. I killed you, I, god help me, I admit it all! To his attendants. Take me away, quickly, out of sight. I don’t even exist—I’m no one. Nothing.85

Creon is very much the tragic hero in this passage from Sophocles, and his recognition of total guilt and demise make his character more sympathetic to audiences. Clearly, Gambaro could not have allowed Creonte this sympathetic, heroic portrayal in the Argentine version, premiered at a moment when the military were steadily making advances in pressuring the state to authorize their immunity, eventually consolidated in the Final Stop Law (La Ley de Punto Final, 1986) and the Law of Due Obedience (La Ley de Obediencia Debida, 1987).86 Gambaro’s Creonte remains scornful and menacing to the end. His refusal to recognize his criminal actions and his lack of repentance echo the testimony that several of the military generals had given just months earlier during the trial of the generals. For example, Massera, during his deposition, affirmed that he would not defend himself against organizing a successful war against subversive terrorism.87 And Viola maintained that he was being accused of something he was proud of: the triumph over subversion (140). A full decade passed before, in April 1995, Lieutenant General Martin Balza, chief of the army, issued an unprecedented statement in which he rejected the defense of due obedience and called the military dictatorship unjustifiable and criminal for violating the Constitution, marking the first time a Latin American commander-in-chief of the army offered an official apology for the crimes committed during Argentina’s dictatorship.88

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Thus Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa is about the different forms, connotations, and implications of recognition and denial during and after dictatorship. Antígona recognizes the body of her brother and is able to begin the rites of mourning. Creonte, however, is unbending in his refusal to recognize accountability, and Corifeo and Antinoo consistently misrecognize Antígona. In this sense Corifeo and Antinoo are, according to Taylor, “culturally incompetent and unreliable witnesses/spectators.”89 In their book Trauma and Healing under State Terrorism, Inger Agger and Søren Buus Jensen discuss the need for recognition from the mourner’s point of view: If you insist on an experience which the surroundings deny, then the message you receive is that your experience is a delusion. When you insist that you saw it happen, you are confronted with the possibility that you have had an uncommon experience, that you have seen, heard, and felt something which never happened—a hallucinatory experience. (137)

In a similar vein Dori Laub refers to the annihilation of the story that occurs when there is no “addressable other” to listen to the memories and affirm their realness.90 Gambaro’s Antígona is precisely such a figure in need of an “addressable other.” Throughout the play, Antígona’s pleas for recognition are met with derision: ANTÍGONA: ¿Me ves, Creonte? ¡Lloro! ¿Me oís, Creonte? (Profundo lamento salvaje y gutural). CORIFEO: ¡No oí nada! ¡No oí nada! (Canta tartamudeando, pero con un fondo de burla). No hay . . . lamentos ba-ba-ba-jo el cielo, ¡ta-ta-tán sereno!91 [ANTÍGONA: Do you see me, Creonte? Can you hear me, Creonte? (Deep anguished wail, raw and guttural). CORIFEO: I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t hear anything. (He stammers as he sings, but with a joking undertone). There are no . . . regrets u-u-under the sky, such a serene sky!]

Agger and Buus Jensen discuss the importance of establishing an intersubjective group space in which survivors may articulate their story. They write, “The group is a place in which time and space is shared; it is a place where one takes a look at oneself and sees the gestures of the others, where people perceive one another and fulfill a task. Through this task, a transformation takes place which creates a structure of mutual bonding.”92 This intersubjective exchange and recognition

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within a social network are also fundamental features of the theatregoing experience. Spectators convene in an intersubjective space and expect to engage in recognition of the events performed. Theatre provides a cultural counterpart to the trial of the generals by allowing spectators the opportunity to reclaim their agency as witnesses. Stanley Cohen is particularly interested in the way onlookers respond to current and past atrocities. He identifies three main groups of bystanders: (1) those who are actual witnesses to atrocities and suffering; (2) those who receive knowledge of trauma through mediated sources, such as the mass media and humanitarian organizations; and (3) other governments or international organizations.93 I mention these categories to highlight the uniqueness of theatrical spectatorship as a form of witnessing in the form of unmediated embodied testimony. This kind of witnessing allows spectators the opportunity to recognize, remember, and commemorate the past, but, beyond these objectives, theatre provides a more valuable vehicle for what Cohen refers to as “negative construction,” that is, “looking back not just to acknowledge, but to undermine the public discourse which allowed for collusion, silence and indifference” (240). Gambaro’s Antígona exemplifies the attempt to expose forms of complicity present in public discourse, most explicitly in her portrayal of Corifeo and Antinoo, the two café dwellers who joke around and refuse to recognize her pleas. This shift of focus from acknowledgment to an exploration of the conditions that perpetuate impunity, social amnesia, and injustice continues in later versions of Antígona in postdictatorial Argentina, explored further in chapter 2.

Chapter

2

From Antigone to Orpheus: Alternative Myths and Figures of Mourning Though debates continue surrounding the outcomes and success of Alfonsín’s transitional human rights policies, the president’s decision to commission a truth report and hold trials for the top military generals of the dictatorship represents a bold and pioneering move, particularly during a time in which the military, though severely weakened, was still able to pose a threat to the fledgling democracy. Inaugurating a democratic era with Nunca Más made testimony a foundational theme for the postdictatorial period. Showcasing transitional justice with a trial against the generals injected legal testimony into the public sphere and reasserted the law, accountability, and spectatorship as fundamental discourses in the newly consolidated democracy. Both Nunca Más and the trial of the generals constructed the identities of the disappeared and survivors of state terror largely in terms of familial, and not political, affiliation.1 This emphasis on family ties in turn shifted focus to the protection of human rights, envisioned as basic and inalienable, thus defusing political tensions that at the time might still have incensed the military. Antigone arose as a central trope during this transitional framework. As a figure both extracted and abstracted from her original text and context, Antigone privileges family ties as well in her quest for justice and condemnation of the state. In the classic transitional piece

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Antígona furiosa, the playwright Griselda Gambaro and the director Laura Yusem put forth strategies for realizing justice that transcend the framework of the law, for drawing attention to embodied forms of testimony, and for recovering bodies onstage to envision a kind of witnessing, through art, that in many cases remained impossible offstage. Subsequent postdictatorial adaptations of Antigone open up the script in an exploratory and often more critical reimagining of familial relationships, testimony, and the possibility of retroactive justice. Alberto Ure’s 1989 version creates a disjuncture between verbal and nonverbal language and lays bare inconsistencies between words and actions, in an indictment of the government’s concessions to the military and the military’s enduring lack of accountability under democracy. In Atando cabos (Tying Loose Ends, 1991) Gambaro extracts Creon and Antigone and places them in a sinking cruise ship in the Río de la Plata, where the Antigone figure (Elisa) proclaims that she will make it her life’s mission to remember and expose the impunity of her daughter’s repressor. These more recent renditions of Antigone make apparent the passage of time; they rewrite the myth to reflect the politicization of memory over the course of the postdictatorial period and to incorporate a new generation of witnesses in the country’s memory debates. Traces of Antigone pervade representations of mourning, family, and memory politics in postdictatorial Argentine theatre, trials, processions, marches, protests, and ceremonies, but over time other figures of mourning have emerged to complement and complicate this legacy. Gambaro’s adaptation of Orpheus from La Casa sin Sosiego (The House without Calm, 1992) provides the underrepresented yet important point of view of a husband mourning the loss of his wife. And in the film Hermanas (Sisters, 2004), Julia Solomonoff returns to the bond of sisterhood found in the classic version of Antigone, but she shifts protagonism to the silent sister, Elena (Ismene from Antigone), and her role as belated witness. Conversely, Gambaro’s character Zaida from La persistencia (Persistence, 2007) represents a mother who has lost her son, but she is the antithesis of Antigone: unable to mourn, she instead seeks revenge by carrying out a massacre and kills her brother in cold blood in the process. Thus this chapter examines permutations of the Antigone myth in postdictatorial Argentina that reflect shifts in collective attitudes

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and approaches to the past as laws and governments changed and as enduring impunity became a part of daily life during the nineties. In portraying the perspectives of sisters, husbands, and fathers, these new configurations of family, mourning, and memory allow an emancipatory release from the Antigone script. In emphasizing the role of new subjects and underexamined events, such as the Malvinas/ Falklands War, the texts and performances presented here provide a more complex and productive account of memory politics and their transformation in later postdictatorship. Antígona Vélez (1951)

Before the premiere of Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa, perhaps the version of Antigone most familiar to Argentines was Leopoldo Marechal’s Antígona Vélez (1951). In Marechal’s play the action takes place in the early-nineteenth-century Argentine pampa during the period of Independence. Antígona insists on burying her brother, Ignacio Vélez, who, after siding with the native indigenous population, dies in battle along with his brother, Martín Vélez. Don Facundo Galván (the Creon figure) prohibits the burial and Antígona and her suitor, Lisandro, commit suicide at the end of the play. In contrast to most contemporary adaptations, in Marechal’s version Antígona dies asserting that the Creon figure is right to condemn her. According to Mirta Arlt, this character reflects Marechal’s view as well: “Para el autor argentino, Galván/Creón no tiene errores que reconocer, pues su situación lo enmarca en una dialéctica que le impone matar (a Antígona) y castigar (al muerto) para el bien” [For the Argentine author, Galván/Creon does not have any errors to recognize, given that he is framed by a dialectic imposing the death of Antigone and the punishment of the dead for the general good].2 Antígona’s speech before her suicide reflects the nation-building project at hand: El hombre que ahora me condena es duro porque tiene razón . . . El quiere ganar este desierto para las novilladas gordas y los trigos maduros: para que el hombre y la mujer, un día, puedan dormir aquí sus noches enteras; para que los niños jueguen sin sobresalto en la llanura.3 [The man who now condemns me is harsh because he is right . . . He wants to win this desert for the fat young bulls and ripe wheat: so that man and woman may one day spend entire nights here; so that children may play in the fields without fear.]

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Marechal refashions Antigone as a national romance for a Peronist audience in 1951. Scheduled to inaugurate the theatre season at the National Cervantes Theatre on May 25 (Argentina’s national holiday in recognition of the May Revolution of 1810), the premiere provided a preelection boost for President Perón’ campaign for a second term. Displays and rituals accompanied the theatrical performance: in adjacent salons of the theatre, exhibitions featured Juan Perón’s progress and Eva’s social work, to which audiences had free access on the days of performances.4 And to heighten patriotic sentiment on the night of the premiere, spectators rose to sing the national hymn before the performance (10). In contrast to Gambaro’s version, in which Antígona is a symbol for resistance against authoritarianism, Marechal’s Antígona vindicates Creon, upholds the nation-state as the supreme power, and essentially aestheticizes violent intervention by the state as a fundamental part of the national romance. Marechal’s Antígona surpasses even the Greek original in validating Creon’s decision to sacrifice Antigone. Marechal’s Creon (Don Facundo Galván) neither questions his judgment nor ever experiences the moment of tragic recognition at the end of the play. Thirty-five years later Gambaro’s Creonte inherits this refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing, although sympathies shift overwhelmingly to support Antígona’s claim. Alberto Ure’s Antígona (1989)

Premiered three years after Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa in 1989, Alberto Ure’s acerbic adaptation of Antigone shows a complete breakdown between verbal language and gesture. Although the playwright adheres to the Sophoclean original, the script is unable to contain the grotesque excesses and pathological symptoms that his characters exhibit onstage. Ure’s Antígona alludes to the breakdown of accountability in the late eighties resulting from juridical decisions that went against Alfonsín’s original human rights efforts and facilitated a growing culture of impunity.5 Ure is known for his controversial stagings, and contrary to Gambaro, he rejects the notion that performance should fulfill the needs of the audience. He and his colleague Elisa Carnelli translated the Sophoclean text into Argentine Spanish, but his staging does not seem remotely connected to the ancient Greek script. If Gambaro’s version creates tension between verbal and nonverbal

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language, Ure’s amputates the two. In Mazziotti’s observations of the play she comments that the characters “imitarán frases inarmónicas con lo que comunica el cuerpo, imitarán a personas de existencia real, se apropiarán de gestos que nunca correspondieron a Antígona, al Corifeo, a Tiresias” [imitate sentences in disharmony with what their bodies communicate, imitate living individuals, and appropriate gestures that never belonged to Antígona, Corifeo, or Tiresias].6 In contrast to the relatively austere set design in Antígona furiosa, Ure’s stage resembles a collage of diverse, cluttered remnants, littered with cardboard, wooden crates, cans, paper, and plastic. An enormous piece of fabric colored with light blue stripes, a clear reference to the Argentine flag, covers the stage floor. Characters wear military uniforms, except for the chorus, and consist of a woman in a wheelchair and another person who does not utter a word throughout the play (2). Another of Ure’s innovations singled out by Mazziotti is that in contrast to most adaptations of Antigone in which characters maintain their lofty, exalted status in spite of their ultimate demise, in Ure’s version, characters display traits of the grotesco criollo in their onstage comportment (3). In a dialogue with Creonte, often cited for its eloquence, Hemón’s speech is interrupted by episodes of hysteria, and he hiccups sporadically and sobs in an eruption of uncontrollable excesses (5). This unfavorable depiction of a figure deemed noble by the Western dramatic canon prompts a questioning of the connection (or lack thereof ) between verbal discourse and action. The total incoherence between verbal and gestural text is disturbing, as there is no referent or encompassing framework to contextualize and make sense of the relationship between movement and text, and bodies and words. Contrary to Ure’s Antígona, Gambaro’s is furious at the end of the play, her fury a result of the continuation of injustice. In Ure’s version, Antígona recites her lines but acts as if disconnected from her context (Greek or otherwise), her fury replaced by numbness. What remains untouched in Ure’s version is the script of the original dramatic text (although translated into Argentine Spanish): an unaltered text resembling an official narrative that in no way represents the experiences of the characters in the play—characters who break down and sob, become hysterical, behave like zombies, and belong to a mute chorus. In Gambaro and Ure’s Antígonas, the body is central in carrying out profound commemorative and political gestures. Charged encounters between embodied and narrative modes of

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expression, characterized by interruptions, disjunctures, and incompatibilities, continue to problematize reconciliation as a desirable aim in postdictatorial Argentina. Gambaro conveys resistance to reconciliation in several of her plays through structural adaptations, intertextual references, and allusion to failed unions. The tension the playwright creates between nonverbal and verbal language exposes the contradictions between language and experience, which, according to Judith Filc, were very familiar to those who had lived under dictatorship.7 This disjuncture between words and experience carried over into the postdictatorial period, when the transition to democracy required the state to act upon speech and speak out about acts of systematic abuse committed under the military dictatorship. Gambaro’s plays consistently show how individuals respond to previously scripted behavior and the tensions that result when characters attempt to resist and break out from prescribed and imposed roles. Thus in El campo (The Camp, 1967) Emma anguishes in her coerced performance for an audience of military officers, in La malasangre (Bad Blood, 1982) Dolores rebels against her role as dutiful daughter in the context of the asphixiating nineteenth-century Rosas dictatorship, and in La Señora Macbeth (2004) Lady Macbeth’s frenetic hand gestures contrast furiously with her robotically controlled body. The Antigone script, however, has provided Gambaro with the most satisfying intertext, allowing the playwright to adapt the heroine’s resistance and claims of justice, rebellion against the state and patriarchy, and the ethics of memory to the postdictatorial Argentine context. Atando cabos (1991)

Commissioned for the London International Festival of Theatre, Gambaro’s Atando cabos (1991) features a dialogue between two characters, Martín and Elisa, in a rescue boat stranded in the river.8 The play begins with the shipwreck of their cruise ship and tells how Martín assists Elisa with her lifejacket and helps her to safety. Once alone in the boat, the two strangers quickly learn they are the mother of a disappeared daughter and a military repressor from the dictatorship.9 At one point in their dialogue Elisa asks Martín, “¿Cómo estoy sentada a su lado? ¿Es que no hubo castigo?” [How is it possible that I am seated next to you? Was there no punishment?].10 To

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Elisa it is inconceivable that she and Martín share the same boat/nation that threatens to sink with both of them in it. As the title indicates, although both characters vow to be tying loose ends and coming to terms with the past, the irreconcilability of their narratives makes this an impossible common goal. Elisa and Martín’s dialogue resembles an intimate conversation between Antígona and Creonte in a streamlined version of Antígona furiosa. As in Antígona furiosa, the female protagonist defies the official, patriarchal narrative.11 Martin resorts to a repressive version of national romance and pushes Elisa to participate in the union in spite of her resistance: ELISA: ¡No me toque! MARTÍN: ¿Por qué? Déjeme besarla. Todavía no estamos tan débiles como para no . . . aprovechar . . . Usted lo dijo: es tan romántico . . . los dos solos en el bote . . . ELISA: ¡Sáqueme las manos de encima! MARTÍN: (un silencio): ¿Quién cree que es? ¿Se vio en el espejo? La dejo porque quiero, ¿sabe? Métaselo en la cabeza: porque quiero.(20) [ELISA: Don’t touch me! MARTÍN: Why? Let me kiss you. We are not weak enough not to . . . take advantage . . . You said so: it is so romantic . . . the two of us alone in the boat . . . ELISA: Take your hands off of me! MARTÍN: (a silence): Who do you think you are? Have you looked in the mirror? I’m letting you be because I want to, you know? Get it through your head: because I want to.]

In this dialogue, Gambaro shows that from Martín’s point of view there is little difference between reconciliation and subjugation. Elisa, incredulous, asks Martín, “¿Es que la historia es esta reconciliación absurda y miserable?” [Is history really this absurd and miserable reconciliation?] (25). Later, when they believe they have been rescued and are returning safely to land, Martín protests winsomely, “¿Por qué usa este tono? No sea rencorosa. (Sonríe) Soy inocente” [Why do you use that tone? Don’t be resentful. (He smiles) I am innocent] (26). Martín’s pretend solidarity and insistence on denial are reminiscent of Creonte’s final discourse in Antígona furiosa, and Elisa similarly responds with Antígona’s fury: “Usted lo dijo, inocente como son los que tienen la fuerza. Algo haré para que no deje de verme” [You said it, innocent

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like the ones who have the power. I will do something so you cannot stop seeing me] (26). Toward the end of the play both Martín and Elisa are exhausted, and the impossibility of their reconciliation acquires an almost quotidian and familiar dimension. Martín suggests to Elisa that they spend a few days in the country relaxing, as if they were an old married couple (25). Atando cabos establishes thematic and discursive continuity with Antígona furiosa but indicates growing wariness of the official discourse of denial and its potentially destructive effects on society. By framing the pair’s dialogue in the context of shipwreck—first of their cruise ship and then of their rescue boat— Gambaro depicts a nation still negotiating between past and present and trying to envision the everyday in the wake of catastrophe and the renewed threat of impunity. Atando cabos is very clearly a postdictatorial version of Antigone in that it depicts the course of postdictatorial memory politics over time and shows how the objective of witnessing shifts from documenting and exposing terror to a call for continued vigilance and monitoring of human rights offenders. This trend to focus on different kinds of witnessing present in the Antigone script is frequent in communities dealing with the effects of mass trauma. Diana Taylor discusses a recent version of Antigone (2000) performed by the accomplished Peruvian theatre collective Yuyachkani, which focuses on the perspective of Ismene, Antigone’s sister, and lends voice to the fear that paralyzed her and prevented her from defending her sister.12 Ismene assumes protagonism, belatedly, and symbolically completes the burial of her brother.13 Taylor remarks, “The hope offered by Antígona is that the spectator, like Ismene, will say ‘I’ ” (211). By focusing on the role of the sister as witness, Yuyachkani’s Antígona transforms spectators into protagonists and centers attention on retroactive justice and the effects of the passage of time on the recollection, denunciation, and processing of trauma (206). In Yuyachkani’s version, Ismene demystifies the permanence of irresolution embodied by Antigone by redeeming her role as witness, assuming the role of commemoration, and completing the burial of her brother (207). In Argentina, the film Hermanas (Sisters, 2004) by Julia Solomonoff similarly exemplifies this focus on sisterhood and the transfer of testimony and protagonism to the sibling who, paralyzed by fear during the dictatorship, becomes a witness years later and provides essential information in completing the disrupted familial and

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national narrative. Like María Inés Roqué’s Papá Iván (2000) and Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (The Blondes, 2003), Hermanas belongs to a canon by a new generation of Argentine filmmakers interested in redefining their relationship to the dictatorial period through the examination of family ties and intergenerational memory. Hermanas documents the reunion of two sisters, Natalia and Elena, in Walnut Creek, Texas in 1984, after an eight-year separation driven by forced exile. Natalia, an international journalist, has come to Elena’s uncannily quiet Texas suburb to visit her family and meet her nephew for the first time, but she has also come to investigate the past in an attempt to understand what happened to her boyfriend, Martín, who had been disappeared during the dictatorship. She discovers her father’s manuscript in a chest—a coded script clearly based on her family and their political involvement during the late seventies—but the last pages of the novel are missing, blocking resolution and perpetuating the mystery surrounding Martín’s disappearance. Throughout the film, while Natalia asks questions and searches for clues, Elena remains aloof and unwilling to discuss the past. She rides her stationary exercise bike and cleans obsessively to keep the pristine surfaces of her suburban home spotless. In this version of Antigone, Natalia (Antigone) has dedicated her life to revealing the truth behind Martín’s disappearance; she sacrifices her chances for finding a partner in order to remain devoted to her lost love from adolescence. Elena (Ismene) has remained suffocated by fear, and though she is allowed to “live,” the burden of not witnessing and preserving her secret takes its toll psychologically and physically. The climax of the film occurs when Elena finally confesses to Natalia that she had destroyed the last pages of her father’s novel because they implicate her in Martín’s disappearance. Through flashbacks the film expertly constructs circumstances to show how Elena was coerced to reveal Martín’s whereabouts in order to safeguard her father’s release from jail. The film ends in a reluctant, and finally pained, embrace between the two sisters before Natalia boards a plane to return to Argentina for the first time since her forced exile. Elena’s ability to overcome her silence and provide the missing information necessary to understand the past makes the embrace between the two sisters possible, though their uneasy gesture at making amends leaves the lingering question of national reconciliation unanswered/unanswerable. What is clear through their embrace is that the main actors and protagonists in the ongoing negotiations of truth and

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memory in Argentina now belong to the younger generation. The film also shows a renewed interest in material evidence as the sisters sift through photographs and documents from the dictatorial period. This return to the archive reflects the continued search for truth by family members, even in the wake of the general pardons in 1989 and 1990, after which time, as Sikkink indicates, though criminal proceedings were impeded, “family members still had the ‘right to truth’ and could pursue that right through judicial investigations.”14 The search for truth long after the traumatic event is also what motivates the plot of Hermanas and facilitates its catharsis in Elena’s emotional confession and act of belated witnessing. As in other postdictatorial plays such as Jorge Goldenberg’s Knepp (1984), Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa, Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Pablo (1987), Marcelo Bertuccio’s Señora, esposa, niña y joven desde lejos (Señora, Wife, Girl, and Young Man from Afar, 1998),15 and many others from the annual Teatro por la Identidad Festival (Theatre for Identity Festival), the disappeared character continues to be the referent and guiding force for the dramas, even though the onstage protagonism has shifted to the roles of surviving friends and family members. Hermanas redeems the bond of sisterhood present in Antigone, overshadowed in Antígona furiosa by the role of maternity, to reveal the transformation of testimony and the possibility of imagining a kind of community formed by intragenerational as well as intergenerational ties.16 La persistencia (2007)

Premiered in 2007 at the San Martín Theatre, Gambaro’s play La persistencia reveals a radical transformation of the Antigone motif to the point of creating an anti-Antigone and a complete disengagement between maternity and mourning, roles strongly linked in Antígona furiosa and Atando cabos. In La persistencia, a disturbing piece based on the massacre of schoolchildren that took place in Beslan, Russia, in 2004, motherhood and mourning continue to be central themes, but here the mother (Zaida) is overcome by hatred and desires to avenge, instead of mourn, her son’s death. In Gambaro’s play, it is the death of Zaida and Enzo’s son that inspires them to mastermind and carry out the school massacre. Thus the threat of inextinguishable hatred at the end of Antígona furiosa reasserts itself maliciously in La persistencia. In the former, among Antígona’s last words are, “Nací, para compartir el

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amor y no el odio. (Pausa larga) Pero el odio manda” [I was born to share love and not hate. (Long pause) But hate rules].17 In La persistencia, it is hatred, not mourning, that motivates Zaida. In reference to her lost son she proclaims, “Y esa sangre ya no existe. Es odio. Ese es mi niño ahora” [That blood no longer exists. It is hatred. That is my child now].18 Zaida’s lover and accomplice, Enzo, finds agency in hatred: “Y el odio es lo único que borra el dolor” [And hatred is the only thing that erases pain] (33). While Zaida’s brother pleads with her to mourn her son: “¡Llorá por tu hijo muerto, llorá por esos que asesinaste!” [Cry for your dead son, cry for those you killed!] (51), Enzo urges the dissemination of pain and suffering among mothers: “Que sufran sus madres como sufrieron las nuestras” [Let their mothers suffer as ours did] (27). Under Enzo’s influence, Zaida kills her brother upon learning his plans to abandon their mission. Gambaro’s twenty-first-century anti-Antigone refuses to mourn her son and plunges a knife into her brother’s back. In contrast to Antigone, who sacrifices her chance to have her own family by defying Creon’s decree and burying her brother, toward the end of La persistencia we find out that Zaida is pregnant with a child who will be groomed to uphold and perpetuate or persist the family’s legacy of hate. The production reunited Gambaro and the stage designer Graciela Galán, who had collaborated in the staging of Antígona furiosa and several other plays. Galán turns the stage into a barren landscape with an uneven, moonlike surface, traversed by characters dressed in rags who seem forsaken by their abstract habitat. The play begins with Zaida kneeling in a corner covering her face with her hands while the wind howls in the background. Though the play clearly alludes to the Beslan massacre through its dialogue, the stage is nondescript and could represent any desolate and forlorn place on the planet. Gambaro again creates tension between site-specific and areferential claims in La persistencia. In interviews her statements reveal the universal scope of her concerns: “Pareciera que en este siglo no se considera para nada, absolutamente, la vida de los chicos” [It would seem that in this century no one has consideration for the lives of children].19 Though envisioned here by Gambaro as a call for awareness of the universal rights of children, the play’s chilling depiction leaves audiences somewhat stunned. After a performance I attended in June 2007, spectators seemed uncertain if applause was the appropriate response to such a disturbing portrayal.

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Somewhat surprising is Gambaro’s denial of the darkness of the play: “De verdad, no creo que la pieza sea oscura; en todo caso, no lo es más que la realidad” [In truth, I do not think the play is dark; in any case it is no darker than reality].20 This statement recalls Gambaro’s previous claims that her dramatic work of the sixties could not be categorized as absurd since it represented her country’s social reality.21 In La persistencia the absurd violence reveals itself to be of global dimension. A notable innovation in La persistencia is Gambaro’s treatment of current atrocity occurring elsewhere outside of Argentina and her framing of the event as representative of a twenty-first-century, universal violation of children’s rights. Gambaro goes on to say, “Puede que sea dramática, pero estoy convencida de que cualquier obra de arte, aunque hable del horror, no transmite horror sino una especie de reparación” [It could be dramatic, but I am convinced that each work of art, although it may speak of horror, does not transmit horror, but rather a kind of reparation].22 Though I find the possibility of reparation in La persistencia elusive, the play nonetheless proposes a radical reimagining of the bond between mothers and mourning, which creates tension with a universal and national canon of mothers who, in mourning for their lost loved ones, have become symbols for the quest for justice and fight against forgetting and impunity. La casa sin sosiego (1992)

La persistencia is not the first play in which Gambaro explores alternative representations of gendered mourning. While La persistencia breaks the bond between mothers and mourning, in an earlier play, La casa sin sosiego (1992),23 Gambaro focuses attention on the mourning husband’s point of view. Also directed by Yusem and staged at the San Martín Theatre, La casa sin sosiego complements Antígona furiosa and Atando cabos by highlighting the overlooked perspective of the mourning father and husband during and after the dictatorship. The play’s six scenes and five interludes were composed as a chamberopera and put to music by Gerardo Gandini. Loosely based on the myth of Orpheus, the play incorporates fragments of the myth from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems and Claudio Monteverdi’s opera. The classic myth tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, whose wedding day ends in tragedy when a viper bites Eurydice’s ankle and causes her death. Overcome by grief, Orpheus climbs to the top of the highest

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mountain and plays haunting music, but, unable to forget Eurydice, he descends to the underworld and presents his case to the powers there. He confesses he cannot bear his loss and begs them to return Eurydice to life, stating that he otherwise prefers to be joined with her in death. The appeal, accompanied by his music, is so moving that the spirits return Eurydice to him, on the one condition that during the journey back to the living world he cannot look back at Eurydice. They are almost out of the valley when Orpheus, desperate to ensure that Eurydice is behind him, looks back, prompting her absorption by darkness and return to death. Thus Orpheus loses Eurydice twice, the second time irreversibly, and he is once more overwhelmed by grief.24 In La casa sin sosiego, the Orpheus figure is played by Juan, the surviving husband, who refuses to believe that the body, present and covered with a dark cloak onstage, can be his wife, Teresa. In Gambaro’s version, Teresa has been returned to Juan from the sea, not the underworld, and she is dead, not alive; thus Juan refuses to recognize her and, as if guided by the original Orpheus myth, does not accept her return to him in any other form than a living being. In a conversation with his mother-in-law, Juan expresses indignation and denial upon discovering his wife’s body: RUTH: Está muerta. Y la trajo el agua. JUAN: Yo vengo del agua. Del mar. No Teresa, que me esperaba en tierra. ¡No es ésa, hinchada de carne! RUTH: Está muerta. JUAN: (exasperado): No lo repitas más. Muerte, muertos, muerta. No lo repitas más. Me esperaba alguien vivo. (Se vuelve hacia el hombre, inmóvil sobre el banco). ¿Dónde está Teresa, papá? (El Padre agobia el rostro contra las rodillas). JUAN: ¿Esa es tu respuesta? Sienten dolor por cualquiera. (Se arrodilla junto al cadáver). ¿Quién sos?25 [RUTH: She is dead. She was brought in by the water. JUAN: I come from the water. The sea. Not Teresa, who waited for me on land. This is not Teresa, this bloated body! RUTH: She is dead. JUAN: (exasperated): Don’t repeat that again. Death, the dead ones, the dead woman. Don’t repeat that again. (He turns toward a man, unmoving, seated on the bench). Where is Teresa, dad? (The father buries his face in his knees). JUAN: Is that your answer? You’d feel pain for anyone. (He kneels down next to the cadaver.) Who are you?]

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As the play develops the reader/spectator learns that Teresa was captured, tortured, thrown into the river, and later washed ashore. In the original myth, Orpheus must come to terms with Eurydice’s return to life and subsequent death on his own, and he mourns his loss through his songs. In contrast to public displays of mourning by mothers, Gambaro’s adaptation of the Orpheus myth shifts focus to how fathers and husbands mourn their lost loved ones. Psychologically paralyzed by Teresa’s disappearance and death, Juan’s father doubles over and hides his face between his knees while Juan, still in denial, demands to know where his wife is (33). In a later scene, when his father tries to protect his son from the painful information regarding Teresa’s death, Juan pleads with his father to tell him, declaring, “¡Hablá! Mejor loco que mudo!” [Tell me! It is better to be mad than mute!] (54). Here Juan shows that he prefers the externalization of the truth and the outspoken defiance associated with the Madres to his father’s silence. According to Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, “fathers of desaparecidos tended to turn anger inward, whereas mothers generally turned anger to the authorities responsible for the disappearances.”26

La casa sin sosiego Credit line: La casa sin sosiego by Griselda Gambaro and Gerardo Gandini. Directed by Laura Yusem. Teatro San Martín. Sala Casacuberta, 1992. Actors: Lia Ferenese and Fernando Martín. Photographer: Carlos Flynn. Courtesy of Kive Staiff and the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires.

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And Rita Arditti summarizes several of the main reasons the Abuelas felt the men did not participate in the movement: “For some it was the greater vulnerability of men that kept them in the background; others thought that men had less ability to cope with pain; still others saw the need for the men to earn a living as the reason for their keeping a low profile.”27 Men’s relative absence as mourners in the public sphere accentuates the uniqueness of Gambaro’s La casa in lending visibility to the role of men in mourning during and after the dictatorship. Compared with the Madres and Abuelas, there are relatively few examples of men whose identities as mourners became accessible to the general public. The journalist Rodolfo Walsh and the poet Juan Gelman are two such figures who have mourned their disappeared children through their writing.28 In his “Carta a mi nieto o nieta” (Letter to My Grandson or Granddaughter, 1995) Gelman writes to a grandson or granddaughter known to have been born to his kidnapped daughter-in-law in captivity. He writes of a potential reunion: “Para reconocer en vos a mi hijo y para que reconozcas en mí lo que de tu padre tengo: los dos somos huérfanos de él. Para reparar de algún modo ese corte brutal o silencio que en la carne de la familia perpetró la dictadura militar” [In order to recognize my son in you, and so that you might recognize in me what I have of your father: we are both orphans of your father. In order to repair, somehow, this brutal rupture or silence, perpetrated on the flesh of the family by the military dictatorship].29 Rodolfo Walsh’s “Carta a mis amigos” (Letter to My Friends, December 29, 1976) relates the journalist’s account of the death of his daughter, Victoria, who had been an active participant in the militant organization Montoneros and who took her own life in the middle of an armed confrontation with the military in order to avoid surrender. Walsh revisits the scene of her death and witnesses it as if seeing it through his daughter’s eyes.30 A homage to his daughter’s militancy, Walsh’s testimony constructs her martyrdom by glorifying her decision to take her own life in a portrayal that once again evokes Antigone. Walsh writes, “Su lúcida muerte es una síntesis de su corta, hermosa vida. No vivió para ella, vivió para otros, y esos otros son millones. Su muerte sí, su muerte fue gloriosamente suya, y en ese orgullo me afirmo y soy quien renace de ella” [Her lucid death is a synthesis of her short, beautiful life. She did not live for herself, she lived for others, and those others are millions. Her death, yes, her death was

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gloriously hers, and I am reaffirmed in that pride and I am reborn through her]. Critics have commented on the metaphor of rebirth and its role in reconstructing family ties in the postdictatorial context. Ana Amado observes that the Madres and H.I.J.O.S. both use this metaphor: the Madres proclaim to have been born by their missing children, while the H.I.J.O.S. state that they are giving birth to their missing parents.31 Judith Filc writes that this reversal of roles inverts the processes of identification between parents and children and thus disrupts the model of the traditional family.32 References to rebirth reiterate maternity as one of the most prevalent symbols during and after the dictatorship and signal a rejuvenation and modification of family models and roles. With the exception of a few such cases, however, representations of paternity were dominated by spectacles of masculinity and militarism during the dictatorship, until the regime’s demise. The culmination of Argentina’s defeat during the Malvinas/Falklands War prompted a crisis in representations of patria and nation. The war quickly became engulfed in silence, and returning soldiers were sent to remote military bases to make sure they remained invisible to the public eye.33 According to Julieta Vitullo in her study on film and narrative of the Malvinas War, the fictions that arose to bear witness to the experience of the war overwhelmingly link the idea of nation to paternity and draw attention to the lack of an epic war narrative to tell the story of Malvinas: “La épica construye necesariamente un linaje de padres, mayores, antepasados. Al cuestionar la idea de nación y poner en evidencia la imposibilidad de un relato heróico, estas ficciones cuestionan también los lazos de parentesco que fundamentan ese tipo de construcciones” [The epic necessarily constructs a lineage of fathers, elders, and ancestors. In questioning the idea of nation and placing emphasis on the impossibility of a heroic narrative, these fictions also question the kinship relations that support these kinds of constructions].34 The impossibility of a heroic war narrative, the questioning of national identity, and the related suppression of discourse surrounding the war all contribute to explain the absence of models of mourning for men, which, in turn reinforced the hypervisibility of mothers in mourning during and after the dictatorship. In his book Las guerras por Malvinas, Federico Lorenz notes that family members of Malvinas/Falklands soldiers did indeed mobilize as well and form groups during and after the war, as seen in Parents and

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Friends of the Soldier (Padres y Amigos del Soldado, PAS), The Commission of the Group of Parents of Soldiers of Malvinas (Comisión del grupo de padres de soldados de las Malvinas), and The National Commission of Parents and Family Members of Combatants Disappeared in Malvinas (La Comisión Nacional de Padres y Familiares de Combatientes Desaparecidos en Malvinas).35 However, these groups did not stage their claims publicly in the same manner as the Madres did. Lorenz also points out that these groups formed when the dictatorship was coming to an end and when opposition was already widespread, marking another key difference. The decision to send soldiers off to war, ill-equipped and untrained to fight for a cause that had been devised as a public relations strategy by the military government, resulted in indignation and calls for accountability. In effect, the dictatorship produced different categories of victims whose coexistence in the national imaginary has remained tense and contested throughout the postdictatorial period. Acknowledging the relative absence of public acts of mourning and commemoration of the soldiers is critical to forming a comprehensive view of the gendered and familial construction of memory discourse and human rights in the aftermath of the military dictatorship in Argentina. In theatre, Gambaro’s play Del sol naciente (The Rising Sun, 1984) is one of only a handful of plays to address the plight of the ex-combatants in the postdictatorial period.36 Most controversial is the question of how to place and relate the disappeared, dead, and returned soldiers in the context of human rights discourse that evolved during the democratic transition. Lorenz refers to difficulties Alfonsín faced in this regard: Era una contradicción entre los intentos por construir una cultura ‘pacifista’ basada en los valores democráticos y de los derechos humanos, y la demanda de conmemoración de un hecho ‘guerrero’ en un país cuya identidad cultural estaba fuertemente marcada por la presencia militar en el panteón nacional.37 [It was a contradiction between attempts to construct a “pacifist” culture based on democratic values and human rights, and the demand to commemorate an act of “war” in a country whose cultural identity was heavily marked by the military presence in its national pantheon].

These “otros desaparecidos” [other disappeared ones], to use José Pablo Feinman’s term, were not victims of the British, but were part of a

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“proyecto antidemocrático, bélico-político, que buscó limpiar con una ‘guerra limpia’ los horrores de la ‘guerra sucia’ ” [an antidemocratic bellicose-political project, which sought to wipe clean the horrors of a “dirty war” through a “clean war”].38 In spite of the general consensus that the soldiers were victims of the criminal and unethical actions of the military elite, they were largely excluded from human rights discourse during the transition and their case was not included in the trial of the generals in 1985. Twenty-First-Century Fathers in Mourning

The relative invisibility of fathers mourning their lost sons in public discourse continued throughout the postdictatorial period until personal tragedy propelled one father rapidly and unexpectedly into the public eye in the role of public mourner. On March 22, 2004, in Martínez, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Juan Carlos Blumberg’s son Axel was kidnapped, held for ransom, and subsequently murdered while trying to escape from his captors. Axel’s death generated an enormous outpouring of support and collective grief, in addition to public demands to address a growing sense of insecurity in greater Buenos Aires, particularly with regard to the phenomenon of extorsive kidnapping, which produced more than 300 such cases in 2003.39 On April 1, within a month of his son’s death, Juan Carlos Blumberg organized a massive march that brought together more than 150,000 people at the Plaza in front of the National Congress. Blumberg called upon the “ciudadanía decente” [decent citizenry] to join him in the occasion.40 Notably absent were political banners and picket signs, and commentators praised the march’s focus on human life in its most essential and depoliticized form.41 Blumberg’s speech during the march unified the masses through universal claims for truth and protection of the nation’s children: “Yo quiero llegar a la verdad, pero el objetivo hoy es cuidar a los hijos de todos” [I want to arrive at the truth, but the objective today is to take care of all of our children].42 Blumberg and observers employed the metaphor of family to create a sense of solidarity; one editorial from La Nación referred to a feeling of “orfandad” [orphanhood] shared by the march participants.43 Blumberg thus appeared as a savior and father figure for Argentina’s middle class in a climate of institutional crisis, widespread fear of crime, and general sense of abandonment. Writing for La Nación,

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Sergio Sinay discusses Blumberg’s significance as a model of paternity: “En una sociedad como la que hoy integramos, que necesita del padre acaso como nunca, Juan Carlos Blumberg es una fecunda fuente de paternidad. Como varón, se lo agradezco” [In a society like the one we belong to, one that needs a father more than ever, Juan Carlos Blumberg is a fecund source of paternity. As a man, I thank him].44 The arrival of Blumberg as a symbolically central father and mourner in the public sphere interrupts a legacy of silence surrounding public mourning practices by men. Blumberg’s sudden identity as public mourner prompted his entry into the tumult of political life as well, the early signs of which can be seen during his first march when his calls to bring together the “decent citizenry” seemed to resonate too perfectly with Argentina’s middle class. From the outset, established human rights groups expressed caution in supporting Blumberg. But in August 2004 Hebe de Bonafini linked Blumberg to the ideology of the fascist right.45 And in that same month, Las Madres del Dolor (Mothers of Pain), the group of mothers of children who had been victims of extorsive kidnappings, elected not to participate in a third march organized by Blumberg because of what they identified as his individualistic attitude.46 Indeed, a number of Blumberg’s statements politicized his image unfavorably and undermined his role as a unifier of Argentine citizens and advocate of human rights. Most divisive was the following statement he made at the August 26 march: “Porque acá—exclamó—, los derechos humanos son solamente para los delincuentes, no para los ciudadanos como ustedes” [Because here—he exclaimed—human rights are only for delinquents, not for citizens like you].47 With this exclamation Blumberg, perhaps unintentionally, but inevitably, provoked the indignation of human rights groups in Argentina still fighting for justice for their disappeared children, who had been deemed delinquent or “subversive” by the military during the dictatorial regime. The following day, surrounded by the Abuelas, the Mothers, and children from H.I.J.O.S. at the House of Government, President Néstor Kirchner took the opportunity to criticize (though not explicitly) Blumberg’s statement and reaffirm his dedication to promoting human rights as an essential component in establishing peace and a democratic society.48 Despite Blumberg’s polarizing speeches, for many Argentines he continued to serve as “la voz tronante del conjunto de la sociedad”

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[the thundering voice of the whole of society]49 and he was able to rally enough popular support to make demands for the introduction of legislation to modify Argentina’s penal code as part of his national campaign to implement harsher laws for criminals.50 In her analysis of the dramatology surrounding the Blumberg case, Mirta Antonelli considers the mediatic production of iconicity and the performance of civil participation to argue that the Blumberg phenomenon actually created a setback in human rights by trying to alter the legal system in a way that accentuated socioeconomic difference.51 Subsequent court rulings have since found parts of the “Blumberg Laws” unconstitutional.52 The Blumberg phenomenon marks both a continuation and rupture with public mourning practices in Argentina spanning from the dictatorship to the present. Notwithstanding dramatically different politics and claims, like the Madres and Abuelas before him, and as a parent who has suffered an unbearable loss, Blumberg channels his grief and transforms it into political agency in the public sphere. The circumstances surrounding these prominent examples of public mourning could not be more different. Yet, there is continuity in the visibility of these iconic parents as public figures of mourning and their influence on public opinion and policy. And though the Blumberg phenomenon responds first and foremost to the post-2001 context of insecurity, police corruption, and institutional crisis, his identity as a father engaged in public mourning addresses a silence that had surrounded men’s role as mourners since the dictatorship. His sudden visibility as a father mourning his lost son contributes a significant component to the discussion of the enactment of family and gender in the public sphere to further human rights and negotiate contemporary memory politics in Argentina.

Chapter

3

Performing Confessions Onstage and on the Stand In 1995 the ex-naval officer Adolfo Scilingo confessed publicly to his involvement in the death flights during the dictatorship, in which drugged prisoners were thrown to their deaths from planes into the Río de la Plata. Scilingo was the first to come forward to offer such an account. His testimony became sensationalized by the media and was followed by a series of confessions made by other military officers and collaborators who admitted to human rights violations, believing that their actions would remain immune from prosecution under Argentina’s amnesty laws first ratified during the eighties. Marking another milestone, Scilingo in 2005 became the first Argentine to be tried and convicted of crimes against humanity in a foreign court under universal legal jurisdiction. While on the stand during this trial, Scilingo retracted all of his previous confessions and alternately feigned amnesia and semiconsciousness to try to avoid prosecution. Regardless of his dramatic performance, medical experts deemed him mentally and physically fit to stand trial and the Spanish Courts eventually found him guilty and sentenced him to over one thousand years of prison. In Argentina, before there was Scilingo, there were Saverios, el señor Galíndez, and el señor Laforgue, presented in dramatic works by the renowned Argentine playwrights Roberto Arlt and Eduardo Pavlovsky: characters whose appropriation and exercise of power, perpetration of violent acts, and impunity anticipate the cultivation of the figure of the

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repressor in public discourse.1 Several of Pavlovsky’s plays construct the subjectivity of the repressor figure through onstage explorations of discourses of confession and mechanisms of denial, escapism, betrayal, and vengeance. In his most frequently performed play to date, Potestad,2 premiered first in 1985, the main character earns the audience’s sympathy throughout the performance by letting spectators believe he is the father mourning the loss of his daughter, when in the end he confesses to his role as her abductor and collaborator with the regime. Staged consistently since 1985, the play has evolved in a context in which the terms memory, accountability, justice, and amnesty have also transformed to hold different meanings for new audiences. In Luis César D’Angiolillo’s film adaptation of Potestad (2002), Pavlovsky plays the starring role, but no longer empowered, his character instead appears defeated; his tired eyes and wary features show the effects of the passage of time. The film portrays him as weak, alienated, and disoriented and recontextualizes him in a world that no longer accepts impunity and shuns him publicly. This chapter examines the discourse of confession as it is performed onstage and on the witness stand from the mid-eighties to 2005. I discuss the violent insertion of these confessions to atrocity in the public sphere, the recycling of scripts of denial, and the relatively recent phenomenon of retraction of confessions in an era in which international law is redefining accountability and retroactive justice in a globalized framework. From Pavlovsky’s plays of the eighties to Scilingo’s confession (1995) and retraction (2005), I analyze the techniques, scripts, and identity strategies that perpetrators (and actors) employ in their confessions and the ways in which these confessional performances and their reception change significantly in the context of this emerging framework. Griselda Gambaro and Eduardo Pavlovsky: Parallel Itineraries

Both Griselda Gambaro and Eduardo Pavlovsky began writing during the sixties; Gambaro collaborated with the foundational avant-garde Torcuato di Tella Institute, while in the late fifties Pavlovsky forged his own path and created the Yenesí Institute, where he wrote and staged Somos (We Are, 1962) and La espera trágica (The Tragic Wait, 1962), his first absurdist plays. Both playwrights were forced into exile during

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the military dictatorship—Gambaro for her novel Ganarse la muerte (To Earn One’s Death, 1978), and Pavlovsky for his play Telarañas (Spiderwebs, 1977), one of the first plays officially prohibited under the dictatorship.3 Upon returning from Spain in the early eighties, they adapted their aesthetic styles to confront the political, social, and psychological realities of postdictatorship. According to the theatre scholar Ana Laura Lusnich the playwrights approached this task differently: Gambaro posed critical relationships through intertextuality and the exploration of the tension between verbal and nonverbal language onstage, while Pavlovsky experimented with the limits and forms of subjectivity, employing role-playing techniques and developing split characters.4 Gambaro and Pavlovsky may share parallel aesthetic, ideological, and personal trajectories in many respects, but the way they approach and conceptualize theatre differs significantly. While Gambaro considers herself a writer and privileges the dramatic text, Pavlovsky defines himself first and foremost as an actor, then a playwright, psychoanalyst, and medical doctor. He believes his plays can be conceptualized only after they are staged, and many of his published plays are transcribed versions of filmed performances in which he improvises and deviates from the outline of the original dramatic text. Furthermore, he creates the vast majority of his work envisioning himself in the protoganic role and referring to his body as his own scenography. His scrutiny of social and historical context reflects both a deeply personal and political endeavor; the theatre critic Olga Cosentino remarks, “La vida de Eduardo Pavlovsky compartió siempre su itinerario con la del país” [The life of Eduardo Pavlovsky and the country (Argentina) have always shared the same itinerary].5 He consciously avoids official venues, and instead prefers to perform his plays in independent, noncommercial theatres.6 The terms Pavlovsky employs to describe his poetics of theatre, such as multiplicidad dramática (dramatic multiplicity) and micropolíticas de la resistencia (micropolitics of resistance), reveal his fundamental desire to establish critical distance and find alternative vantage points from which to question and undermine official, dominant structures and narratives.7 In Potestad (1985), Pablo (1987), and Poroto (1998), Pavlovsky’s theatre worlds are filled with anguished characters who obsessively recall the past or pathologically avoid it, seek out solidarity or find refuge in isolation. The plays’ fragmented dialogues introduce isolated

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anecdotes from the past, and characters undergo radical transformations, explore different subject positions, and put on and take off roles—sometimes effortlessly, sometimes desperately. Pavlovsky’s plays of the eighties and nineties are improvisational and emphasize collective creation, the use of body language, and an exploration of nonmimetic forms. In all of Pavlovsky’s plays the search for identity involves rigorous bodily expression. In his study on theatrical space, Charles Lyons notes, “No theatrical representation of human experience can be performed that does not exhibit a human figure in space and reveal itself in time.”8 This intersection of subjectivity, space, and time has inspired analyses of performance and memory in Pavlovsky’s work. Jacqueline Bixler discusses the representation of memory and absence in relation to the historical referent in several of Pavlovsky’s postdictatorial plays.9 In addition to being memory plays, Potestad, Pablo, and Poroto are plays about perpetrators of violence, their confessions to this violence, and the strategies they develop before and after they confess to come to terms with their roles as perpetrators. Potestad (1985)

Both the author and critics alike consider Potestad to be one of Pavlovky’s most important works. First directed by Norman Briski and staged at the Teatro del Viejo Palermo in May 1985, the premiere initially received very little critical attention. According to Pavlovsky, there were only six performances and “no la vio nadie” [nobody saw it].10 Over the years, the play has evolved and has gradually achieved critical acclaim and recognition both in Argentina and internationally. Originally, the play was conceived of as an opening monologue to accompany the premiere of Ricardo Bartís’s version of Pavlovsky’s Telarañas. Early productions of Potestad featured additional onstage live props, including a drummer, a blues singer, and a police dog, which detracted attention from the central father character. The only other onstage character was initially cast as a man. According to Pavlovsky, the performance came to life after his wife, Susy Evans, replaced Tito Dago in the role of the onstage character who listens to the Hombre’s narration (113–23). Pavlovksy first instructed Evans to play the part of Ana María, the main character’s wife, whose primary role is to remain silent and unresponsive to the Hombre’s story

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(118). In later versions Evans appears as Tita, the almost silent female companion who shares the stage with Pavlovsky during his monologue. Through improvisations over the years the duration of the performance has doubled from approximately half an hour to a little over an hour.11 One of the only stage elements that has not changed is the manipulation of the chairs, although all other props have been eliminated, to accentuate the Hombre’s domineering presence.12 Pavlovsky calls Potestad paradigmatic for the way the drama combines gestural language and verbal narrative, maintaining that “El sentido se incorpora al lenguaje del cuerpo, más allá de lo que dice la palabra. Una cosa es decir ‘no’ con la palabra y otra . . . construir un ‘no’ con movimientos corporales y gestuales.” [Meaning is incorporated into body language, beyond that which words can express. One thing is to say “no” with words . . . and another is to construct a “no” with bodily movements and gestures] (215). In her study of Potestad, Bixler links the presence of a barren stage to the father’s existential crisis and persistent denial of the past.13 She observes the way Pavlovsky’s use of nonverbal language and pantomime of absent characters creates a fusion between past and present time registers, reflecting the symptoms of traumatic memory (20). Bixler concludes that, in spite of the play’s ambiguity, Pavlovsky’s ultimate goal is to denounce a “politics of amnesia” (27). Over the course of the play the father fills the stage with his exaggerated gestures and disjointed narratives of denial to keep the past at bay (offstage) and prevent it from flooding into the present (onstage). The play begins with the father’s (El Hombre) anguished testimony of what is understood initially by audiences as the abduction of his daughter, Adriana. The set is almost completely bare, except for the presence of two chairs. The daughter, Adriana, and the wife, Ana María, do not appear onstage, although they are central to the father’s narrative, which recreates in minute detail the exact moment at which his daughter was taken from their home. The play begins with the father facing the audience, standing in front of the two chairs onstage, reenacting the event through pantomime of his wife and daughter’s gestures, movements, and positions on the Saturday afternoon the “abduction” takes place. Interspersed throughout the narrative are endearing anecdotes of Adriana’s childhood mixed together with allusions to the true identity of the father, only revealed toward the end of the play.

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The performance culminates in an identity transformation and the father’s confession that he had collaborated as a medical doctor with the military. Toward the end of the play, the actor (Pavlovsky, usually) goes to the back of the stage, places his hands on the wall with his arms and legs apart, and after a brief moment turns around and resumes his seated position, facing the audience: “Al darse la vuelta aparece transformado en un burdo personaje fascista con las manos en la cintura. El proceso de metamorfosis es casi grotesco” [When he turns around he appears with his hands placed on his waist, transformed into a rough, fascist character. The process of metamorphosis is almost grotesque].14 He then describes how he had been called during the dictatorship to sign the death certificates of two parents who were killed by a military operative. He relates how, at the scene of the deaths, he had discovered a newborn baby left behind and takes her home to his wife, telling her never to ask questions about where the baby came from. Only after the main character’s onstage transformation are audiences able to reassess the father’s account and realize that the “abduction” scene he narrates actually refers to the first step of Adriana’s restitution and return to her biological family. The last lines of the play, however, reveal the father’s ominous prediction that if things continue the way they are, the three of them will once again be together again. Richard Schechner explains that transformations occur in the stories put forth in drama, in the mind and body of the performer, and in the audience.15 Describing the conditions for the transformation of audience consciousness in theatre, he writes, Aesthetic drama compels a transformation of the spectators’ view of the world by rubbing their senses against enactments of extreme events, much more extreme than they would usually witness. The nesting pattern makes it possible for the spectator to reflect on these events rather than flee from them or intervene in them. That reflection is the liminal time during which the transformation of consciousness takes place. (172)

Pavlovsky makes this sensory engagement with extreme events one of his primary aims in Potestad, described as an “emotional striptease” in the credits of its New York premiere in 1988.16 Jean Graham-Jones identifies character splitting as a frequent postdictatorial theatrical technique, producing in spectators “a defamiliarizing jolt that breaks the empathic bond of identification with the character and forces them to step outside and reevaluate what they have just witnessed.”17

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The protagonist of Potestad undergoes a radical (although imperfect) identity transformation, and spectators, too, are forced to transform their perception of events both as a community of spectators and as individuals. Dubatti identifies the play’s “cataphoric structure” to refer to the way allusions are made to an underlying reality that is not explicitly identified until the dramatic denouement.18 Pavlovsky’s play most renowned for this kind of structure is El señor Galíndez, in which the domestic setting is revealed to be a torture chamber toward the end of the play. David William Foster discusses some of the implications of this use of cataphoric structure in El señor Galíndez and suggests that the play’s shocking revelation presupposes spectators’ reluctance to accept the characters’ (Beto and Pepe) identities as torturers, even though there are linguistic cues throughout the text alluding to their violent professions.19 Foster’s observations reveal the way spectators are positioned and forced to decide between competing versions of reality, presented through discrepancies between allusive and explicit language. There are numerous examples of this in Potestad: at one point when the “father” is once again going over the removal of Adriana from his home, he alludes to his collaboration with the violent operation. His language is grammatically dense, hypothetical, and filled with circumventive excess. He tells Tita, his silent and motionless onstage companion: Yo pensé que esto podría ocurrir alguna vez, Tita, pero nunca imaginé que fuera así, demasiado de golpe, estas cosas . . . pueden ocurrirle a otro, a otro. Nunca a uno. De haber sido que las cosas podían ocurrir así, pienso que tal vez deberíamos haber actuado de otra manera, haber hablado más con ella, haberla prevenido, a veces pienso si no nos equivocamos en algo.20 [I thought this might happen at some point, Tita, but I never thought it would be this way, so abrupt, these things . . . can happen to others, to others. Not to oneself. If I had known that these things could happen this way, I think perhaps I would have acted differently, I’d have spoken more to her, warned her, sometimes I think we were somehow wrong.]

Here the “father” alludes to but does not explicitly identify criminal acts or acknowledge responsibility. Compare this with his description of the murdered parents after he has transformed into the tyrannical figure at the end of the play: “¡El papá y la mamá de Adriana eran fanáticos, Tita! ¡A estos hijos de mil putas, si no los cagaban a balazos

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en la cama te cagaban ellos, te hacían volar la casa . . . !” [Adriana’s father and mother were fanatics, Tita! If they [soldiers] didn’t shoot those sons of bitches in their bed they would have blown up the house . . .!] (188). Andrés Avellaneda identifies a difference between allusive and explicit language in the military’s discourse during and after the dictatorship. He observes, “El relato oficial, en suma, decía sobre la subversión pero aludía sobre la represión” [The official story, in sum, told about subversion but alluded to repression].21 The cataphoric structure of Potestad fosters audience identification in the first part of the play when language alludes to repression. The moment in which the “father’s true identity” is revealed coincides with his appropriation of explicit language to describe the subversive tactics he attributes to Adriana’s parents, immediately destroying bonds of empathy with audiences. Spectators naturally feel tricked and even violated by the character inversion at the end of the play. In interviews with Dubatti, Pavlovsky cites a common response by spectators to Potestad and El señor Galíndez: “¿Cómo me hacés identificarme con este tipo y después me mostrás que era un monstruo?” [How could you make me identify with this person and then show me he is a monster?].22 Magda Castellví deMoor refers to Pavlovsky’s antagonistic manipulation of identificatory processes in his work: “Es en efecto, una manera de escribir en contra del público a favor de su toma de conciencia de la realidad” [It is, in effect, a way to write against the audience in favor of the facilitation of a new consciousness of reality].23 In addition, Pavlovsky echoes Alberto Ure’s critical assessment of the uniform, celebratory response to Teatro Abierto by demonstrating that he is not interested in providing a mirror for a newly united, democratic “we” in Potestad; rather, he wishes to expose the perseverance of authoritarian structures in place even after the transition to democracy. In Potestad, and in other plays, Pavlovsky explores the role of the repressor to demystify the myth of the torturer as an inhuman monster and expose the banality of evil.24 Pavlovsky believes that only through analysis of the psychology of the repressor figure can future acts of systematic torture be prevented. In his essay “Denuncia de una represión futura” (Denunciation of Future Repression) he writes, “Hoy predomina en nuestro país este tipo de creación de subjetividad. Maquinaria de fabricación del olvido y del perdón. Textura de grandes complicidades. De silencios vergonzantes. Ayer la denuncia

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clamorosa de la gran tortura. Hoy el perdón dulzón” [Today this kind of subjectivity predominates in our country. Machinery of forgetting and pardon. Texture of great complicities. Of embarrassing silences. Yesterday the resounding denunciation of torture. Today the sweet pardon].25 Pavlovsky wrote this piece in 1990, after Menem offered the second round of general pardons. The “resounding denunciation of torture” refers to trial of the generals, which began in April 1985, just one month before the premiere of Potestad in May 1985. In the intimate space of Teatro del Viejo Palermo, the performance of the main character in Potestad mirrors that of the generals in the courtroom, unwavering in their denial of wrongdoing.26 Yet Pavlovsky, in his embodiment of the repressor, reveals much more about the mechanism of denial; his body’s frenetic, repetitive movements make manifest his disturbed psychological state, and his onstage grotesque transformation produces a (col)lapse in which he confesses to his criminal role, if not remorse. The presence of the tyrannical figure in a domestic setting also resonates with the idea of “el microfascismo diario” (daily microfascism), another concept that Pavlovsky draws on to describe the gestation of state fascism in the family structure, displayed emblematically in his play Telarañas.27 Pavlovsky’s explorations of fascist subjectivity onstage have generated criticism from human rights groups and theatre critics alike.28 The president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, has expressed disapproval of Pavlovsky’s portrayal of the human dimension of the figure of the kidnapper. Pavlovsky defends this depiction of the repressor/kidnapper/torturer by stressing that “si bien el raptor es éticamente condenable, tiene afectos y emociones, tiene hijos, se preocupa por ellos, los va a ver, les habla por teléfono” [even if the kidnapper is ethically condemnable, he has feelings and emotions, he has children, he worries about them, he visits them, and he talks to them on the phone].29 Potestad demonstrates the coalescence of these two extremes—humanness and monstrosity—in the character of El Hombre. Pablo (1987)

As in Pavlovksy’s Potestad, the point of departure in the play Pablo is an overwhelming void. Pablo, the absent character, is, as Jacqueline Bixler observes, “at once an absent referent and a metonymy for the entire

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text.”30 He is the common link shared by two onstage characters, V and L, one of whom (V) has returned from exile and insists on remembering and reexamining the past, and the other (L) has collaborated with the repressive regime and is in the process of cultivating an isolating amnesiac discourse. Pavlovsky remarks being intrigued by the frequency of the question “¿te acordás?” [Do you remember?] in conversations during the postdictatorship period.31 In fact, the question “Do you remember?” drives the play, and Pablo, the absent character, is the referent that both unites and estranges characters as they attempt to reconstruct social bonds and common frameworks of reality. In Pablo, characters are brought together but are unable to communicate and establish a common frame of reference. The character V, who was absent, insists on remembering, whereas L, the character who was present, insists on forgetting, producing irony and irreconcilable rupture. L attempts to articulate himself exclusively from his immediate present, whereas V formulates questions, asking who, when, where, how, why, and what things are and were like. He is particularly concerned with naming things. One of the most frequent questions posed by V in the play is, “¿Cómo se llama ese lugar donde . . .?” [What was that place called where . . . ?].32 The abundant use of ellipsis throughout the text signals the presence of silences, omissions, and voids. In the introductory notes to the play he explains, “Hay texto. Pero texto con vacíos. Listo para ser transgredido” [There is text. But it is text with voids. Ready to be transgressed] (134). V’s question, “¿Cómo se llama ese lugar dónde . . . ?” refers to this quest to uncover and recover the past, but it also reveals the gaps and silences that complicate this task. In the staging of Pablo, theatrical space transforms into a surreal dreamscape filled with curiously placed and seemingly unrelated objects, including a bed suspended above the stage, two trapezes, a window perforated with holes, and a train station. In the opening scene V gets off the train and knocks on L’s door. His first line, “Vengo de parte de Pablo” [I come on behalf of Pablo] (136), initiates the mysterious encounter that structures the entire play. In V and L’s conversations V cites anecdotes from a common past they shared with Pablo, making L noticeably uncomfortable. L insists he does not know Pablo and at one point yells at V: “¡No recuerde más!” [Stop remembering!] (143). The play’s dialogue is absurd and confused, and the fractured scenes blend erotic and sinister registers in unsettling ways. In one episode V and L peer through holes in the window and witness

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the torture and rape of a man and a woman. In another, V walks around the stage, pondering a dream while L and a third character, Irina, simulate sex in the background, accompanied by music and the sound of the Concord jet passing overhead (156). Throughout the play it gradually becomes clear that V has returned to avenge Pablo and kill L, whose exact involvement in Pablo’s death is unclear, but almost certain, because of his collaboration with the repressors and will to forget. In the ending scene L utters the word “Pablo” in between gasps as V suffocates him to death. Behind the orchestration of this disturbing world is the vision of director Laura Yusem, known for her innovative stylization and transgression of realist norms.33 Of particular interest to this discussion is Yusem’s experiment with memory in the pre-production stage of the play. Yusem felt that the inherent ambiguity in the dramatic text did not permit the actors to engage the characters in a manner that would allow them to rehearse productively.34 In response, the director, together with the three actors, developed a story line and secret identities that had nothing to do with the text; during rehearsals, actors were instructed to elaborate upon their invented identities without divulging the secret to the audience (165). Yusem’s idea was that during performances the actors would work on forgetting their prehistories. Thus, the fragmented, troubled world depicted by Pablo is the result of a theatrical experiment of forced forgetting. As a concept, and interpreted metaphorically, Yusem’s experiment exposes the unfeasibility and undesirability of staged forced forgetting off- as well as onstage, where rehearsals of forced forgetting were sanctioned in the first laws of impunity during the mid-eighties. Practically, however, one is left wondering if her critique remained completely inaccesible to confused spectators. From reviews, it would appear that the actors were quite successful at bewildering spectators. Indeed, Pavlovsky observes that although audiences may feel moved or impacted by the performance of Pablo, they are often unable to narrate a synopsis of the plot after leaving the theatre.35 Luis Mazas, theatre critic for Clarín, writes, “Se diría que Pablo, la última obra de Eduardo Pavlovsky, es como una invocación del inconsciente colectivo de víctimas y victimarios ” [One would say that Pablo, Eduardo Pavlovsky’s last work, is like an invocation of the collective consciousness of victims and victimizers].36 Pavlovsky, too, makes references to the role of the unconscious in the creative process, equating Pablo to a great oneiric kaleidoscope.37

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The theatre scholar Jorge Dubatti recalls his experience as a spectator of Pablo: “Recuerdo la puesta en El Hangar, los espectadores se ubicaban como al borde de una pileta adentro de la que transcurría la acción” [I remember the staging at El Hangar, spectators were seated around the edge of a large pool, in which the action took place] (129). In Pablo, actor and spectator space are integrated, and the action takes place in front of and between spectators, forcing them to move in order to see the action.38 Mogliani comments, Al obligar al espectador a movilizarse para poder observar lo que acontecía casi detrás o al costado suyo, buscaba romper el proceso perceptivo tradicional. Al necesitar efectuar una actividad física para poder percibir el espectáculo en forma continua, el espectador tomaba un rol activo en el espectáculo, superando su presencia como pura mirada pasiva y realizando una actividad de focalización. (162) [Obligating spectators to move around in order to observe what was happening almost behind or next to them, sought to interrupt the traditional receptive process. Requiring spectators to move in order to see the action in uninterrupted form made them take an active role in the performance, surpassing their presence as a purely passive gaze in exchage for an activity requiring focalization.]

As audience members crane their necks and move their bodies to witness the performance, they also register one another’s movement and shifting gazes to form a community conscious of the act of spectatorship and the potential for collective action. Poroto (1998)

Written first as a short story in 1996 and then expanded and published as the novel Dirección contraria (Opposite Direction) in 1997, Poroto has undergone multiple literary transformations. In collaboration with Pavlovsky’s long-time friend and colleague, Norman Briski, the story was adapted to the stage and performed for the first time in 1998 at the Teatro Calibán in Buenos Aires.39 This reinvention and layering of texts involves the author and spectators alike. Gail Bulman observes, “By dialoguing with his own (play)texts, Pavlovsky creates a metatext, through which he begins to interpret his text and demands that the reader/viewer do the same.”40 In the staging of Poroto, Pavlovsky forfeited his usual protagonism and took on the role of a secondary

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character, Willy, while Briski assumed the role of the main character, Leo. Considered by Pavlovsky to be one of his most complex works, Poroto examines escapism as a strategy with creative potential, illustrated through the character Poroto to ensure freedom of thought and expression and to explore through movement and dialogue different sites of enunciation and subject positions. Poroto enacts an encounter between two old friends, Poroto and Leo. As in Pablo, the two characters share a common history, which is revealed to be political when, through Willy’s narration and Leo’s confession, we learn that Poroto and Leo were activists in the seventies who planted a bomb that, when intercepted, killed innocent bystanders. Poroto and Leo are the two remaining members of the group. Through Willy’s voice-over we learn that one of the original group members has committed suicide, and another has gone insane. The creation of Willy’s character serves to replace the omniscient voice in the narrative version, lending the play a literary quality not common in Pavlovsky’s dramatic works. Willy plays the role of the waiter in the restaurant where the reunion takes place. He narrates Poroto’s meticulously calculated escape plans. As in the case of the main character in Potestad, Poroto is obsessed with physical articulation and spatial definition of intersubjective relationships. As opposed to Potestad, however, in which the main character recreates past situations through gesture, Poroto’s ultimate goal in his physical calculations is to plan an escape. Willy comments, “Para Poroto toda su vida se reducía a las estrategias de sus huidas y cómo retirarse sin ser sospechado”41 [For Poroto, his entire life became reduced to his strategies of escapes and how to flee without appearing suspicious]. In the course of the play, Poroto is about to flee several times, but is detained by Leo, either through his hypnotizing conversation or physical touch. In one scene, Poroto prepares to escape and Leo reaches over the table and takes his hand. Willy observes and documents Poroto’s movements and thoughts in this exchange: El zapato derecho de Leo rozaba el zapato izquierdo de Poroto. Todo roce podía precipitar alguna jugada importante. Pensó en levantarse e ir al baño desde la puerta podría tener una mirada más abarcadora sobre el control de la situación hasta ahora en manos de Leo. Como si Leo hubiese percibido sus intenciones sorpresivamente lo tomó de la mano izquierda con su mano derecha sobre la mesa. (95)

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[Leo’s right shoe grazed Poroto’s left shoe. Any touch could precipitate an important move. He thought about getting up to go to the bathroom from the door he could have a more encompassing view to control the situation, until that point in the hands of Leo. As if Leo could perceive his intentions he unexpectedly took his left hand into his right hand on the table.]

Pavlovsky comments that the tension between the desire to flee and the desire to stay sustains the momentum of the drama: “Y así surge la otra idea: cuando Poroto está reunido con un amigo, evoluciona el diálogo y comienza a sentir que ingresa en un nuevo estado que desconoce: el deseo de permanecer. Lo invaden los afectos y tiene ganas de estar” [And thus arises another idea: when Poroto is meeting with his friend the dialogue evolves and he begins to feel he is entering an unknown state: the desire to stay. He is invaded with feelings and he wants to stay].42 In Poroto, staying facilitates exchange and solidarity between Leo and Poroto. The intersubjective space created by Poroto’s presence proves to be testimonial in the play, allowing both Leo and Poroto to address emotionally charged moments from their past. Only toward the end of the play does Poroto make this cathartic confession to Leo: Leo te extrañé mucho te hubiera necesitado tanto todos estos años . . . Muchas veces me encontré hablando con vos muchísimas veces pidiéndote consejos hablando de amores de política estaba solo hermano— absolutamente solo—fueron años de abismos de silencios y de muertes—de traiciones y claudicaciones y hubo que soportar además la gran indiferencia . . . la tremenda indiferencia . . . te quiero mucho hermano te necesito . . . estoy contento de poder decírtelo hoy siempre hoy. . . .43 [Leo I missed you so much I needed you so much in all those years . . . Many times I found myself talking to you asking you for advice talking about love but in politics I was alone brother—absolutely alone— those were the years of abysmal silences and deaths—of betrayals and impediments and one had to bear great indifference . . . tremendous indifference . . . I love you brother I need you . . . I am happy to be able to tell it to you today always today . . .]

Shortly after his confession, in the last section of the play, Poroto makes his escape imperceptibly, leaving Leo alone and inconsolable in the café. Willy divulges Poroto’s whereabouts in his narration of the outcome of the play in the closing scene: Mientras tanto en la plaza de Villa Devoto—sentado en un banco cercano al Hospital Zubizarreta Poroto reconstruía con minuciosidad paso a paso

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en su “libreta de jugadas” lo que él consideraba una partida excepcional. Estaba feliz como pocas veces después de las partidas. Al terminar de anotar su última jugada—que él denominó “jaque al corazón” en referencia a la de su expresión de amor por Leo cerró bruscamente la libreta y comenzó a correr por la plaza a pasos agigantados. (115) [Meanwhile in the Plaza Villa Devoto—seated on a bench near the Zubizarreta Hospital Poroto—reconstructed meticulously and step by step what he considered to be an exceptional play in his “book of games.” He experienced a happiness he almost never felt after his games. When he jotted down the last note of his play—which he called “checkmate” in reference to his expression of love for Leo—he closed his book and began to run around the plaza in gigantic strides.]

At the end of the play Poroto has broken the intimate bond he established with Leo and revels in his solitary triumph. Pavlovsky insists that Poroto’s escape be considered healthy and creative, not just evasive and phobic, and he relates this fleeing strategy to his own life experience, commenting, “Descubrí que en mí y en otra gente la huida tenía una función creativa-potente” [I discovered that in myself and in others escape had a creative and potent function].44 Perhaps the most literal example in Pavlovsky’s personal life of a self-preserving, life-saving escape is the dramatic get-away he made in 1978, when a military operative stormed his office and Pavlovsky, who was seeing patients at the time, was forced to jump out of a window to elude capture. Pavlovsky describes his escape: A partir de ahí todo fue más onírico, como si mis movimientos fueran más lentos. Se lentificó la escena. Cierro la puerta y le digo al grupo de pacientes: “Señores, a ustedes no les va a pasar nada, no se asusten, yo me tengo que escapar.” La gente se quedó estupefacta, perpleja, sobre todo algunos que no imaginaban nada de nada. Salto por una ventana a la terraza de la casa de al lado y por el vidrio veo a dos hijos míos tirados en el suelo, en la cocina, con un encapuchado.45 [From that point on everything became more dreamlike, as if my movements were slower. The scene slowed down. I close the window and tell the group of patients: “Ladies and gentlemen, nothing will happen to you, don’t be afraid, but I have to escape.” The people were left stupefied, perplexed, mostly they couldn’t imagine what was happening. I jump out the window onto the next door neighbor’s terrace and through the glass I see my two children lying on the floor in the kitchen with hoods over their faces.]

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This escape initiated Pavlovsky’s exile period, which lasted from 1978 to the mid-eighties and included time spent in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid. In his critical essays and interviews Pavlovsky maintains that the basic theory of Poroto takes from the French sociologist Alain Touraine’s ideas on the problem of returning to oneself.46 In Poroto, premiered ten years after Pablo, Pavlovsky revisits and builds on themes of national belonging and personal and collective expressions of identity. In Pablo characters are reunited in an attempt to negotiate how to assimilate the memory of the absent main character into a common frame of reference. In Poroto, the dialogue established between Leo and Poroto opens up a line of communication that facilitates their recognition of participation and accountability of their past actions, though Poroto’s tactics of aversion ultimately undermine the process. In addition to facilitating mechanisms of denial, Poroto’s calculated escapes demonstrate ways of resisting the consolidation of group identity. Pavlovsky is critical of the reconstruction of collective identity based on consensus, perhaps because of the implicit reconciliation that this regrouping suggests. This inherent skepticism can be traced to his criticism of the indifference of the middle class he calls the “colchón acrítico” (acritical cushion) and later of the homogenizing tendencies of dominant, global systems.47 Pavlovsky maintains that Poroto “huye para preservar su libertad e identidad, sus propios valores, su micropolítica en un mundo” [flees to preserve his freedom and identity, his own values, his micropolitics in the world] (23). In his essays, interviews, dramaturgy, and acting, Pavlovsky emphasizes the importance of developing the critical distance necessary to create an awareness of and resistance to conformity to dominant modes of thought. Poroto, a hero of resistance, in Pavlovsky’s words, spends the majority of the time strategizing his “plays,” finding different subject positions through physical movement and role-playing. The creative tension that results from the joint desire to stay and flee arises out of a liminal, in-between space that both provides the possibility of reinforcing already existing social and ideological paradigms and serves as a site for the creation of alternative models.48 Pavlovksy has written on the “entre” (in-between) phenomenon in relation to psychodrama, defining “entre” as “lo que está en el medio circulando, fluyendo . . . una noción de conexión y de diferencia” [that which is in the middle circulating, flowing . . . a notion of connection and difference].49 The main

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focus of Poroto is on how the main character fluctuates between wanting to form a social connection and the desire to establish distance. Borrowing from Umberto Eco, Dubatti calls Poroto an epistemological metaphor, illustrating through onstage movement this performative negotiation between representation of preexisting structures and the constitution of new social and ideological alternatives.50 The Film Potestad (2002) El veredicto de la sociedad los declaró culpables y construyó cárceles invisibles pero invulnerables.51 [Society’s verdict declared them guilty and constructed invisible but invulnerable prisons.]

Spanning over forty years of production, Pavlovsky’s dramatic works and essays interweave social and historical reference, personal and political perspectives, and multiple genres and roles to create an impressive collage of contemporary Argentine identity. In his most recent work, Pavlovsky draws on this multifaceted corpus that fuses his art and his life by restaging plays, incorporating scenes from past plays into new ones, and recycling characters to establish connections between the past and the present and to rediscover sites of articulation and points of identification with his audience.52 Directed by Luis César D’Angiolillo and released seventeen years after the premiere of the play, the film adaptation of Potestad features Pavlovsky, again, in the leading role as the repressor figure.53 The film, however, takes this figure from the play Potestad and surrounds him by society and portrays him as defeated, paranoid, and alienated, in order to show the consequences of his complicity and pathological denial over the course of time in a very different social and ideological climate. The intertextual dialogue created between the play and the film produces both continuity and rupture, and the film’s audience represents a new generation of spectators, largely in their twenties, who relate to issues of complicity and resistance differently than their parents did almost twenty years earlier. Pavlovsky was initially resistant to the idea of making Potestad into a film, maintaining that it would be impossible to translate the dramatic intensity he expresses through his body to the screen.54 He finally agreed to the project when D’Angiolillo and Sienra presented

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him with a screenplay in which the entire drama takes place inside the main character’s head. The dramatic text makes its way into the film in fragments, narrated by Pavlovsky in the form of a voice-over, revealing the main character’s thoughts as he revisits significant scenes from his past. The memories the “father” narrates in the play translate into vivid hallucinations in the film. The opening scene of the film takes place on the A line of the Buenos Aires subway. Pavlovsky’s character, named Eduardo, is seated alone with a distant expression on his tired face.55 He smiles halfheartedly and waves at a boy who becomes frightened and clings to his mother, who stares at Eduardo accusingly. In slow motion the camera shows a confused Eduardo turning his head to look out of the subway window. Suddenly, the subway stops and is inundated with Malvinas/Falklands protesters. In slow motion the camera shows how Eduardo covers his temples with his hands and closes his eyes. Abruptly the scene changes and Eduardo is alone, again seated on the subway, this time next to a man. Eduardo’s face lights up as he tells the man he is going to pick his daughter up at school. Moments later he contradicts himself and tells him he is going to a café. Suddenly he looks out of the subway window and sees a woman with a little girl. He rushes out of the subway and runs after them. They vanish from sight, and he is left alone in the subway station, staring at his watch, which says 3:45. He compares it to the clock in the station, which says 10:20, and is left there standing out of sync, in a state of uncomprehending angst. The psychological instability the main character exhibits in the play translates into temporal fragmentation in the film. D’Angiolillo depicts these contrasting time registers through jarring scene changes accompanied by physical props, such as newspapers dating to the dictatorship period, references to the 1978 World Cup, and a sticker on the subway that says “Los Argentinos somos derechos y humanos” (We Argentines are Upright and Humane).56 The subway is one of the film’s most emblematic motifs. Scenes showing Eduardo on the turn-of-the twentieth-century A line and the modern D line alternate between the past and the present. A subterranean labyrinth that controls the movement of individuals and guides them toward their destinations, the subway is an easy metaphor for the unconscious, but more pragmatically, the subway is a real place that assembles a diverse cross-section of society in an enclosed space. The subway is

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where Eduardo experiences his most vivid hallucinations of the past, but it is also the space where he confronts and is judged by Argentine society in the present. D’Angiolillo’s film introduces context that is not dependent on the main character’s bodily reenactment and verbal narrative. In the play, the main character is practically alone onstage. He creates the other characters through pantomime, but the offstage world is only perceived through the eyes of the repressor. In D’Angiolillo’s film the offstage invades the onstage and forces the protagonist to confront society’s incriminating gaze. D’Angiolillo calls his film a “película de miradas” (a film of looks).57 The main character encounters these hostile looks in the city’s everyday public spaces as he frequents cafés, parks, bakeries, and the subway. In one scene, Eduardo is forced to leave the subway when a group of young porteños recognizes him as an ex-collaborator and surrounds him, staring him down until he leaves. Spectators see the grimace on Eduardo’s face when, upon leaving, one of the young men yells behind him, “¡Viejo hijo de mil putas!” [Old son of a thousand bitches]. This scene recalls the escraches that began to take place in Argentina in the nineties, public spectacles organized by the children of the disappeared designed to target criminals of the dictatorship to make their identities and whereabouts known, and to draw attention to the injustice of their impunity. Hugo Vezzetti analyzes the escrache as a form of memory activism in postdictatorial Argentina that belongs to the same genealogy as the marches of the Madres, the Abuelas, and the commission of Nunca Más under Alfonsín. These acts all share the goals of exposing the crimes and injustices of the dictatorship period and creating public awareness and denunciation of the past. Vezzetti’s article focuses on the escrache as a predominantly urban phenomenon whose spectators are the perpetrator’s neighbors and whose objectives surpass mere denunciation and exposure.58 Diana Taylor writes, “These performances not only make visible the crimes committed by the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, but they also make visible the lasting trauma suffered by families of the disappeared and the country as a whole.”59 As Vezzetti notes, the escraches serve as improvised courthouses and political spectacles and intervene in the community to promote a more critical approach to past events (7). As in other forms of active memory, Vezzetti observes, escraches do not just reproduce memory discourses, but facilitate appropriation and recuperation

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of memory by certain groups (7). This redistribution of agency and perspectives is captured metaphorically in the interplay of gazes in D’Angiolillo’s film. Eduardo cannot escape these gazes in the public sphere, but conversely, in the private sphere of his home, his wife, Ana María, refuses to return his gaze. She wears her headphones to isolate herself from her husband, and she will not look him in the eye. Their lack of communication seals the guilty pact they share but are unable or unwilling to acknowledge. As in the play, Eduardo expresses his desire to talk to Ana María, but she ignores his attempts and the possibility of testimony and the exchange of truth between them collapses. The introduction of multiple gazes complicates the processes of identification in the film. The play’s impact relies largely on the “trick” the main character plays on the audience to create a strong bond of identification in the beginning of the play. Spectators are shocked when, after the onstage metamorphosis, they realize that they have been sympathizing with the perpetrator. In the film, the surprise element is significantly reduced because of several factors. First, from the beginning of the film, spectators are wary of identifying with the main character, who is psychologically unstable, debilitated, and shunned by society. In the play, the narrative of grief and loss is much more convincing and the figure of a father in mourning fills the entire stage. In the film, however, this narrative loses its strength, becomes fragmented, and is interspersed among scenes in which Eduardo is placed in an antagonistic relationship to society. Furthermore, spectators are offered other vantage points and possibilities of identification. There is the gaze of the biological parents of Adriana, the human rights group representatives, and other members of society who recognize him as one of the collaborators during the military regime. Changes in identification and the diminished surprise effect in the film can also be attributed to the fact that Pavlovsky’s role as the repressor in the play Potestad became well known through its numerous stagings over the years both in Argentina and abroad. By the release of the film, the play had already gained popularity and found a place in Argentina’s cultural imaginary. Pavlovsky comments on the evolution of the reception of the play and emphasizes that in 1985 their audience never exceeded thirty people. Convinced that the play would eventually attract a larger audience, Pavlovsky continued to stage the play in subsequent years. Not until the mid-nineties did this occur,

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and the composition of the audience had changed. In 1998 Pavlovsky observes, Desde 1994 repongo Potestad en Babilonia, siempre a teatro lleno y con gente muy joven. El año pasado realizamos 9 funciones con más de 120 espectadores entre 20 y 25 años por función: el público que nunca pudimos tener del 85 al 87. El público joven que ahora presencia la obra tendrá en aquella época 10 ó 12 años. Entonces eran testigos pasivos de una historia que pertenecía a sus padres.60 [Since 1994 I have staged Potestad in the Babilonia Theatre, always packed with young people. Last year we did 9 performances with more than 120 spectators between the ages of 20 and 25 in each performance: the audience we could never have between 85 and 87. The young audience we have now would have been 10 or 12 years old during that time, when they were sill passive witnesses to a history that belonged to their parents.]

Young spectators belong to Adriana’s, not the parents’, generation. The self-analysis the play demanded of spectators in 1985 becomes dialogical in later productions and prompts younger viewers of Potestad to address questions to their parents’ generation. Of these new spectators, Pavlovsky remarks, “Hoy, nuevos jóvenes son protagonistas de una nueva historia que ellos construyen y diseñan” [Today’s youth are protagonists of a new history they are constructing and designing] (15). As younger audiences gradually replace the old, bonds of identification shift and the frame of reference expands to include intergenerational perspectives of Potestad, cultivated over three decades of frequent reproduction of the performance in theatre and film. D’Angiolillo’s film version broadens the visual frame of reference, reduces a previously omnipotent figure, and introduces heterogeneous perspectives and discourses. The generational shift in spectatorship has created new sites of enunciation for a younger audience whose roles as “passive witnesses” as children during the dictatorship have been replaced by active participation in the negotiation of contemporary Argentine memory politics. From playing the collaborating medical doctor in Potestad in 1985 to the defeated and socially dysfunctional Eduardo in D’Angiolillo’s 2002 film version, Pavlovsky has consistently shown a predilection for exploring a range of repressor identities. In spite of the controversy surrounding his affinity for playing the role of the repressor figure, Pavlovsky is nonetheless a pioneer in the use of performance

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to engage themes of memory, repression, and injustice in recent Argentine history. Potestad is one of the first plays to address the illegal appropriation of children from the disappeared, making it an important, albeit unlikely, precursor to the twenty-first-century Teatro por la identidad (Theatre for Identity) festival. Potestad premiered the same year as the Oscar-winning film The Official Story (1985), written by Luis Puenzo and Aida Bortnik and directed by Puenzo, a film exposing the practice of appropriating children of the disappeared for audiences worldwide. In this film, the protagonist, played by Norma Aleandro, is a middle-class history teacher, who in the early years of the postdictatorship period slowly begins piecing together the incomplete details of her daughter Gaby’s adoption and realizes that she is a child of disappeared parents, a realization that forces her not only to question the degree of her husband’s involvement in the abduction but the entire “official story” of the nation she believed in and taught. As in Potestad, the film documents a transformation of consciousness in the main character, and both the film and the play presuppose and deeply question the premise that it was possible for an educated member of the middle class to remain innocent/ignorant of the mass disappearances and other forms of repression that took place during the dictatorship. The Official Story does this much more delicately than Potestad, and the empathic bond established between spectators and the main character never breaks. She is very much portrayed as a victim, in the end shown together and in solidarity with the child’s biological grandmother, who is looking for her granddaughter. The guilty husband and perpetrators of the crimes remain peripheral, largely absent characters. In contrast, Pavlovsky’s Potestad places spectators in the same room as the enemy and confessor of complicity in the appropriation of Adriana and the murder of her biological parents. The Official Story promotes the idea that the middle class did not have access to certain knowledge until after the dictatorship, when a cathartic release of information instigated the coming to consciousness of the masses. Premiered in the same year as the trial of the generals, the film helps consolidate a discourse of innocence for the middle class, designating its members a spectatorial role, separate and exempt from involvement in the dictatorial past. In his classic work Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal puts forth his theory of the coercive system of tragedy, in which catharsis plays a key role. He writes, “Catharsis is correction: what does it correct? Catharsis is purification:

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what does it purify?”61 In The Official Story, coming to consciousness somewhat ironically results in disengagement from the past and produces a cathartic release, which, to use Allen Feldman’s words, “too easily transcends the violence described.”62 Conversely, Pavlovsky’s Potestad sets up audiences for cathartic disengagement through the father’s testimony of personal loss and mourning, but inverts the flow of identificatory energy abruptly when audiences are forced to assimilate (not purge) the knowledge that they have been identifying with the perpetrator and not the victim. In performing the confession and making the audience confront this sudden admission of criminality, Pavlovsky foreshadows a cascade of confessions to torture and human rights violations made by military officers and collaborators during the nineties. In 1995 Naval Captain Adolfo Scilingo, Navy Sergeant Victor Ibáñez, and Police Sergeant Julio Simón (“Julián el Turco”) all came forward and admitted to their roles in committing human rights violations during the dictatorship on Argentina’s popular television and radio shows.63 These confessions were extremely important because they broke the code of silence that the military had maintained regarding the disappearance of prisoners, and they exposed quite sensationally the “vital lies” the military relied upon to sustain their defense of the “war against subversion.”64 They narrated in first person their involvement in methods of torture and disappearance that even Nunca Más expressed as unfathomable: “Lanzamiento de detenidos al mar. Cuesta creerlo. Sin embargo, hay numerosas declaraciones que hacen mención a ello” [Throwing the prisoners into the sea. It is hard to believe. However, there are numerous declarations that reference it].65 These confessions introduced the individual subjectivity of the perpetrator in public discourse through the explicit admission of acts, which until that point had been related from the point of view of survivors. The first in the line of confessions, and the most famous, is that of Adolfo Scilingo, who admitted to throwing thirty drugged prisoners into the Río de la Plata during the notorious death flights carried out by the Argentine navy during the dictatorship. Scilingo, long tormented by his actions, approached the highly respected investigative journalist Horacio Verbitsky on a subway platform in Buenos Aires and said, simply, “I was at ESMA. I want to talk to you.”66 Verbitsky immediately assumed Scilingo had been a prisoner until he clarified to the journalist that he was a colleague of Juan Carlos Rolón, a fellow

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officer from his time at the Navy School of the Mechanics (ESMA). Scilingo met with Verbitsky for a series of interviews and allowed his confession to be recorded, in which Scilingo explained in excruciating detail his actions and the protocol of the death flight operations, citing one episode, in particular, which had been a source of recurring nightmares for Scilingo. In one of the flights, Scilingo almost slipped and fell through the hatch as he was throwing prisoners out of the plane (49–51). According to his wife, Scilingo’s participation in the death flights had destroyed him. He needed sedatives to sleep, drank heavily, and alienated himself from his family.67 Already in 1984 he confessed to his superiors that he was distraught over his participation in the death flights, and shortly thereafter he was forced into retirement (200). Verbitsy writes, “When Scilingo lost his balance and was about to fall into the sea together with one of his victims, the military mechanism of depersonalization and dehumanization broke down inside him. For the first time he was able to see the enemy as a human being.”68 This process of humanization that occurred over the course of his confession was painful for everyone involved. Feitlowitz writes, “Scilingo’s coming to consciousness was at once appalling and lacerating to watch, and appeared to surprise Scilingo more than anyone.”69 But, as Verbitsky remarks, Scilingo’s coming to consciousness was confused: “Neither had the collective tragedy in which he played a part, the devastating effect it had on his personal life, nor the decision that, to his credit, led him to make a public confession, automatically brought any lucidity to his reasoning.”70 In fact, more than remorse, the confession revealed Scilingo’s deep sense of betrayal by the military and the ideological framework that he believed had justified his actions. The idea of due obedience became, in Feitlowitz’s words, Scilingo’s “magnificent obsession.”71 Though Scilingo was clearly devastated by his participation in the death flights, his behavior and remarks indicate that instead of a desire to express remorse or to seek reconciliation or atonement, in reality what drove Scilingo to confess was his anger at the superior generals who had been pardoned by Menem and the generals’ argument that many of the subordinate officers had exhibited excesses in the treatment of prisoners beyond their control. In fact, the episode that had triggered Scilingo’s confession was the denied promotion of his colleagues, Antonio Pernías and Juan Carlos Rolón, because

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of their involvement in torture at the ESMA. Incensed by what he viewed as a great injustice to his colleagues, Scilingo penned a letter to chief of staff of the navy, Admiral Enrique Emilio Molina Pico, in which he threatened to reveal the truth regarding the fate of the disappeared if his colleagues were not promoted.72 In another letter to the newly pardoned Videla, Scilingo writes, In response to the matter of the disappeared, you said that there are subversives living under assumed names, others who died and were buried as persons unknown, and, finally, you did not reject the possibility that certain excesses might have been committed by your subordinates. Where do I fit into that? Do you believe that the weekly transports were the result of unauthorized excess? (8)

Scilingo makes a similar gesture in expressing his desire to declare on behalf of the lesser-ranked Alfredo Astiz (referred to by the Madres as the “Blond Angel of Death”) to try to convince the French authorities to dismiss charges against him (9). To Scilingo, the only thing Astiz was responsible for was carrying out orders issued by the Executive Power. In Scilingo’s mind, either all military should have been found guilty and taken responsibility for their crimes or they should all have been absolved and their actions vindicated. His torment grew not out of his guilty conscience, but because he realized public discourse and the position taken by the high-ranked military during the postdictatorship were gradually converting him into a criminal. In her comparative study on the discourse of confession in postconflict societies, Leigh Payne writes that perpetrators’ accounts of their past actions may include “remorse, heroism, denial, sadism, silence, fiction and lies, amnesia, and betrayal.”73 Scilingo’s confession certainly contains a number of these, yet betrayal is by far the most prominent. Regardless of the exact combination of motives for his decision to come forward, Scilingo’s confession initiated a major shift in the military’s official discourse regarding the dictatorship, exemplified by chief of the army, Lieutenant Martín Antonio Balza’s historic statement in 1995 (made after Scilingo’s confession) denouncing the applicability of Due Obedience to justify immoral orders.74 In 1995 the human rights activist Emilio Mignone told Feitlowitz, “They have killed twenty or thirty thousand people; how can they not be aware that it will come back and hit the country like a boomerang?”75

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The boomerang effect began with Scilingo’s confession and prompted a reassessment of the perpetrator’s role in discourses of retroactive justice. The Final Stop and Due Obedience laws (1986, 1987) and Menem’s general pardons (1989, 1990) had created a framework of impunity in which a select number of perpetrators felt free to come forward and confess their crimes publicly on Argentina’s television screens and airwaves, inserting their narratives violently into the daily lives of Argentines. Regarding the harrowing confession of ex-sergeant Victor Ibáñez on a popular radio station, Feitlowitz remarks that “Porteños can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing at the time of this broadcast” (208). In the wake of mass atrocity discourses of confession and amnesty often go hand in hand. Most famously, in the amnesty hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-Apartheid South Africa, former perpetrators received amnesty in exchange for their confessions to criminality and human rights violations.76 Conversely, in Argentina, confessions arose after amnesty had already been secured for perpetrators, making their motives in many ways less clear and potentially more psychologically revealing. One possibility Scilingo did not foresee was the early twentyfirst-century annulment of Argentina’s amnesty laws and the growing influence and application of universal jurisdiction to try cases of crimes against humanity.77 The international legal and human rights scholar Ruti Teitel situates her discussion of international law in the context of an emerging form of globalized humanitarianism: “The growth of humanitarianism concurrent with the globalization of politics draws attention to the ways in which human rights complement and displace rights traditionally guaranteed by nation-states in the modern state system that is now under siege.”78 A new chapter in the Scilingo drama began in October 1997, when he voluntarily flew to Madrid to confess (again) to his participation in the death flights to Judge Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish magistrate renowned for his decision to issue the warrant of arrest to have the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet extradited to Spain to face charges of crimes against humanity. Upon hearing Scilingo’s admission of involvement in the death flights, Garzón placed him in preventive detention, and in 2005 Scilingo became the first Argentine perpetrator to be tried in a Spanish court for crimes against humanity.79 The Nuremberg Trials in 1945

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offer the most cited example of international jurisdiction for trying perpetrators of crimes against humanity, regardless of where the crimes are committed. Teitel writes, “To this day, the normative legacy of that postwar jurisprudence has constituted the foundation for concepts of universal human dignity that are at the core of the international human rights regime” (228). At the turn of the twenty-first century, the legal scholar Stephan Landsman identifies the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the detention and extradition request of Augusto Pinochet, and a host of other novel legal initiatives to “underscore the startling growth of efforts to establish a worldwide criminal process capable of punishing heinous crimes ranging from genocide to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”80 Jacques Derrida notes that a corollary to this globalizing criminal process is the politicization of forgiveness reflected in these “scenes of repentance, confession, forgiveness, or apology which have multiplied on the geopolitical scenes.”81 In 2005 in Madrid, under the universal jurisdiction upheld by Spain’s Supreme Court, Scilingo was charged with genocide and terrorism and was eventually found guilty of committing crimes against humanity and received a final prison sentence of 1,084 years.82 According to one representative of Amnesty International who spoke after the trial, the sentence marked a new era in the defense of human rights.83 One of the most remarkable aspects of Scilingo’s trial in Madrid is his performance on the stand. Much like Pavlovsky’s incarnation of the omnipotent perpetrator in the play Potestad, who later is depicted as socially ostracized in D’Angiolillo’s film, Scilingo too transforms from a man who is “impeccably groomed, wearing a suit by Christian Dior, and highly articulate,”84 in 1995 during his appearance on the television show Hora Clave into a weak and disoriented individual proclaiming amnesia on the stand in Madrid a decade later. In both cases the identity transformation illustrates the effects of the annulment of the impunity framework on the perpetrator figure. In a sense, Scilingo embodies his strategy: his extreme physical and mental degradation replaces this impunity framework and takes on its function, providing him the defense of amnesia and semiconsciousness to avoid accountability for his actions. One reporter present at the trial wrote, “Quien había simbolizado la omnipotencia más execrable del ser humano, la del torturador frente al torturado, apareció representando la suma impotencia” [He who had symbolized the most abominable omnipotence of a human being, that of a torturer before the tortured, appeared

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representing the utmost form of impotence].85 Unbelievably, even after confessing to his crimes publicly in Argentina and Spain (on television and the radio, to Judge Garzón, in Verbitsky’s best-selling book and his own), Scilingo, when on the stand in Madrid, tried to retract everything, maintaining that all of the information he had confessed to he had gotten from the media or read about in Nunca Más.86 When asked to explain the reasons behind his previous self-incrimination, Scilingo repeatedly insisted that he had made up “disparates” (nonsense) in order to draw attention to the atrocities committed by others, but that he himself had not participated in any way.87 And in other moments during his erratic testimony, Scilingo denied any knowledge whatsoever of the death flights, the clandestine detention centers, or the disappeared in general.88 On January 14, 2005, the first day Scilingo was scheduled to appear on the stand, he was pushed into the courtroom in a wheelchair, his feet shuffling on the floor. With an ashen complexion, his eyes closed, wrapped in a blanket with his hands covered with wool mittens, Scilingo seemed to be retreating from contact with the outside world.89 When he refused to respond to questions and appeared to be only semiconscious, one onlooker was overheard saying, “Este es peor que Pinochet” [This one is worse that Pinochet].90 And the presiding judge asked, “¿Está el procesado impedido o es una simulación?” [Is the accused impaired or is this a simulation?].91 Doctors were on hand to examine Scilingo and assure the judges that, aside from exhibiting weakness, Scilingo’s vital signs were normal and that he was mentally coherent and capable of responding to questions. In spite of the doctors’ recommendations, the trial could not proceed because Scilingo did not emerge from his semiconscious state. On the third day of the trial, however, Scilingo arrived to the courtroom as if transformed: “Enérgico, confuso y locuaz, casi sin señales de su presunta huelga de hambre de más de un mes” [Energetic, confusing and loquacious, almost without signs of his alleged month long hunger strike].92 In these moments of heightened stimulation, Scilingo put forth conspiracy theories, reiterated his noninvolvement in crimes, or alternately insisted upon his total ignorance of the acts he had confessed to a decade earlier. Many commentators present at the trial make reference to Scilingo’s acting abilities. One journalist writes, “El tribunal tendrá que valorar ahora si el acusado es un gran actor y fingió en aquella ocasión o si,

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por el contrario, miente ahora” [The court now will have to evaluate if the accused is a great actor and faked it during that past occasion or if, on the contrary, he is lying now].93 In addition to interpreting the law and evidence, judges, lawyers and onlookers of the trial were also expected to be able to interpret Scilingo’s body language, his psychological state, motives, and past and present utterances in order to determine if he was acting or not. With the passage of time, the aging of perpetrators, and the breakdown of impunity, physical and mental impairment (acted or real) arise as the only remaining possibilities of immunity for perpetrators charged with crimes against humanity. Pinochet, Scilingo, and others have shown that this is a phenomenon on the rise as universal jurisdiction gradually acquires influence in the prosecution of human rights violations. With perpetrators feigning amnesia and mental instability and slipping into unconsciousness, arrival at a verdict depends on trial observers’ ability to detect the performance of a ruse on the stand. Scilingo’s masquerade emphasizes the theatricality inherent in juridical proceedings, and spectators must interpret his testimony on the stand, at least partially, as if pronounced by an actor onstage. In Scilingo’s case all of the evidence stacked up against him and spectators were able to compare his retraction against a mountain of self-incriminating transcripts from previous confessions. Scilingo’s renewed attempt to assume the discourse of denial that was uniformly shared by the military generals during the trial of 1985 failed significantly. The framework of impunity dismantled, Scilingo’s confession acquired meaning and implications that Scilingo never could have envisioned in 1995. In the same year that Scilingo confessed to his participation in the death flights for the first time in 1995, Pavlovsky wrote an essay about the perpetrators who appear as characters in his plays and the perpetrators who had been thrown into the spotlight after their confessions: “El señor Laforgue o El señor Galíndez son siempre la vuelta terrorífica de lo reprimido. Pero tengamos bien en cuenta que Rolón, Pernías y Scilingo no representan sólo historias pasadas de la represión, sino la confirmación de que esos dispositivos represores siguen intactos” [El señor Laforgue or El señor Galíndez are always the terrifying return of the repressed. But it should be clear in no uncertain terms that Rolón, Pernías, and Scilingo represent not only past stories of repression, but also the confirmation that those repressive devices

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remain intact].94 Pavlovsky’s portrayal of the mourning father in Potestad, whose grotesque transformation at the end of the play reveals him to be a regime collaborator and kidnapper, offers one of the first representations of a perpetrator under dictatorship—in art or in the public sphere—who confesses, not out of remorse, but simply because he knows he can. In 1985 spectators of Potestad were left in stunned silence to consider the perversity of this power, still manifest in Scilingo’s 1995 confession. At the end of Potestad, when the Hombre begins to describe the abduction of Adriana in detail, drops of blood begin to fall on his face, continually, until he has finished his account of the episode. In his closing lines the Hombre professes arrogantly that he is quite hopeful he will be reunited soon with the little girl he appropriated illegally, at which point his face is completely covered with blood. Significantly, the blood covers his face in addition to his hands. He is guilty not only of complicity with the regime but also of identity appropriation of Adriana and of the figure of the father in mourning in order to gain sympathy with the audience in the role of victim. Potestad foreshadows the emergence of the perpetrator’s confession in public discourse during the nineties and also alludes to the significant role blood will play as genetic evidence to recover the identities of the children stolen during the dictatorship.95 Pavlovsky’s dramatic canon of perpetrators overlapped uncannily with “real-life” perpetrators during the eighties and nineties, yet as time has passed and mechanisms of impunity have broken down nationally and internationally, these performers have become contextualized differently, their omnipotence diminished by irrefutable evidence, and audiences—both of the play and of the trial—have learned to anticipate and recognize recycled scripts of denial and reject them as obsolete in a new globalized era of accountability.

Chapter

4

Argentina’s Postdictatorial Stages: Resting Places and Places of Unrest During the campaign leading up to the landmark presidential elections of October 1983, commentators concur that one of the main reasons Raúl Alfonsín, member of the Radical Civic Union Party (UCR), triumphed over his Peronist rival, Ítalo Luder, is that Argentines found Luder’s approval of the military’s hastily drafted self-amnesty laws unacceptable. Also a factor in securing Alfonsín’s historic win was the crazed spectacle of the burning of a coffin with Alfonsín’s name on it that took place during the closing ceremony of the major Peronist campaign rally, just two days before the elections.1 According to press accounts, the Peronist candidate for Buenos Aires governor Herminio Iglesias, later coined by the press as “El del cajón” [the one with the coffin], appropriated the microphone from an unexpecting Luder during the ceremony and demanded silence from the hundreds of thousands of spectators in attendance as he set the empty coffin ablaze.2 The sinister spectacle, staged in the heart of Buenos Aires against the backdrop of the Obelisk at the intersection of the Avenue 9 de Julio and Corrientes, proved to be too violent for spectators, who were just emerging from the horror and devastation of the dictatorship and the Malvinas/Falklands War.3 In the end Iglesias was unsuccessful

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in facilitating Luder’s victory through the symbolic burial and burning of his rival. Indeed, the only thing that Iglesias succeeded in burying was his own political career. The burning of an empty coffin onstage is a less refined example of the manipulation of ritual for political means, but it nonetheless serves to introduce one of the main inquiries of this chapter, which is how agents (artists, politicians, activists, etc.) employ bodies to uncover and suppress often competing versions of history, to revive or diminish charged political alliances, and to accentuate or repress conflict and violence. Plays and performances examined here, as in Griselda Gambaro’s La malasangre (Bad Blood, 1982), Ricardo Monti’s Una pasión sudamericana (A South American Passion Play, 1989) and Finlandia (2001), and El hombre de arena (The Sandman, 1992) by the object theatre group El Periférico de Objetos, stage the return of polemical historical figures, de- and recontextualize bodies, and enact resurrection and burial onstage to insinuate unresolved history into postdictatorial memory politics. La malasangre (1982)

The premiere of La malasangre at the Teatro Olimpia in Buenos Aires took place two months after Argentina’s defeat in the Malvinas/ Falklands War (April 2–June 14, 1982), a catastrophic military endeavor directed by General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri in one last attempt to manufacture national consensus and rally popular support for the disintegrating dictatorship. Following the war, censorship laws eased and, although staging controversial plays in 1982 was still of considerable risk, the director Laura Yusem and the main actress Soledad Silveyra convinced the reluctant production crew of the timing and urgency of La malasangre, a metaphorical work that sends a clear message denouncing repression and authoritarianism. One of the main characters in the play, Benigno, is fashioned after the nineteenthcentury caudillo figure and dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. In spite of this specific periodization, audiences were expected to interpret the anti-authoritarian message within the more immediate context of the dictatorship. Astonishingly, however, it was the anti-Rosas portrayal and not the associations with the military dictatorship still officially in power that made Yusem most apprehensive about the staging.4 Indeed, a group called the National Movement for Restoration filed

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complaints with the City of Buenos Aires, demanding censorship of the play because of its defamatory portrayal of General Rosas (18). One of the most sensational anecdotes surrounding the staging involves a group of pro-Rosas nationalists, who, upon learning of the negative treatment of a Rosas-like figure, decided to take action into their own hands at a performance just several days after the play’s debut. According to Yusem, a group of about fifty young men belonging to the pro-Rosas National Movement for Restoration purchased tickets to see the play several nights after the premiere.5 When the actor who played the role of Benigno (Lautaro Murúa) came onstage, the group of men stood up from their seats and brandished their handguns. A somewhat chaotic sequence of events ensued as the lights went on and the men advanced toward the stage, yelling “Viva Rosas” [Long live Rosas!] calling Yusem “comunista” and Murúa “montonero.”6 The leader of the group approached the performance space and came close enough to place his gun over the stage. According to Yusem, the actors were terrified that the men were going to shoot. The audience reacted with fury and outrage toward the group of men, and Yusem recalls how one elderly woman pummeled the leader of the group with her purse while yelling, “¡yo quiero ver el espectáculo!” [I want to see the play!]. Meanwhile, the producer had called the police, and in seconds the tension was defused when the police arrived and took the group of men away. Yusem relates that the man working at the newspaper kiosk outside of the theatre could not be convinced that the episode had not been a publicity stunt. Most remarkable about this brief but intense episode is the range of emotion and differences in perception that it produced in those who witnessed it. The actors’ terror, the audience’s fury, the elderly woman’s indignation, and the kiosk employee’s disbelief were all provoked by the same incident. At the heart of the issue is the ambiguity regarding the scope of the fictive element in the spectacle. Susan Bennett describes the social contract that theatregoers enter into during a theatrical performance. This contract involves audience members’ willingness to perceive events as a part of dramatic action within a theatrical frame.7 Highly malleable, this frame can expand to include space outside theatre doors, as in the case of the man at the kiosk who was certain that the spectacle had been a publicity stunt and a part of the fictive, performative framework. Indeed, it is difficult to sort out all

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of the performative elements at work in this episode. The improvised spectacle clearly illustrates the interconnectedness between theatre, history, and key political discourses that informed the transitional period following the war. In the case of this particular performance of La malasangre, the actors unexpectedly became spectator/witnesses to a real event, a group of spectators became actors, and the remaining spectators became witnesses to an event that demanded negotiation of perceptive roles and obscured the real or fictive nature of the spectacle unfolding before their eyes. The disruption of the Malasangre performance took place at a historical juncture when the rules of spectatorship were in a state of flux. To generate consensus in support for the war, the military regime had reterritorialized urban spaces as places of uncontested national unity (much as they had done in preparation for the World Cup in 1978), thereby allowing supporters to convene spontaneously in city plazas, wave Argentine flags and honk their horns in city streets.8 As Rosana Guber notes, the mass assembly of people in central urban spaces in support of the war created a sudden, remarkable contrast to the systematic disappearances of individuals who had once occupied those same spaces (47). Immediately after the military conceded defeat, demonstrations were once again repressed and people went back to breathing in tear gas on the streets of Buenos Aires (111). Diana Taylor’s observations on the performance of nationness and spectatorship, and what she has described as the “double mechanism of imagining and imposing national/gender identity” under dictatorship, help to conceptualize the reorganization of urban space and the fluctuating policies regarding public gathering and demonstration toward the end of the dictatorship.9 The disturbances that interrupted the performance of La malasangre reveal a breakdown in the uniform notion of “nationness” imposed under dictatorship and a pronounced conflict of interest in the imagination of the nation, as enacted by the pro-Rosas nationalists and the onstage actors. In La malasangre, Rosas makes a ghostly return, in the way Marvin Carlson understands “ghosting” in theatre to refer to the identical thing previously encountered by audiences, though in a different context.10 In his original context, Rosas was governor of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1832 and 1835 to 1852, his second term considered to be his most authoritarian and repressive. Rosas arrived on the national stage in time to suppress what seemed to be an irremediable

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rupture between unitarians and federals that was driving the country toward anarchy.11 Rosas, a federal, championed integration of Buenos Aires and the provinces, supported Argentina’s ranching interests, and “viewed the body politic as a large-scale estancia or regiment whose hierarchy of interdependent parts required firm direction and control.”12 Rosas inherited his style of rule from the colonial period, and instead of deferring to Argentina’s new constitution, which he referred to as “ese cuadernito” [that little notebook],13 the caudillo preferred to exercise his authority through the army, a secret police force (the mazorca) and the church.14 His rule came to an end in 1852, when he lost to General Justo José de Urquiza at the Battle of Caseros and the dictator fled to England, where he would remain exiled until his death in 1877, although his remains would ultimately be repatriated to Argentina in 1989. In general, the topos of return surrounded the moment of the 1982 premiere of La malasangre. The soldiers who were sent off as heroes, upon return, were perceived as victims who had been betrayed by their military superiors. Fearing the possibility of rebellion by the veterans, senior military leaders dispatched returning soldiers to remote bases to keep them outside of the media’s eye.15 Construed symbolically as future fathers of the nation during the pre-war campaign, the veterans, once they returned from Malvinas, were marginalized and rendered invisible, and inversely, representations of paternity became visible in the symbolic sphere. The uprising in the Malasangre performance responds directly to this acute crisis of (paternal) representation as the unruly revisionists in the audience sought to vindicate Rosas as the founding father of the nation. In general terms, Argentines were also anticipating the return to democracy after eight years of military dictatorship, a transition marked by controversial gestures of reconciliation and the dual invocation and repression of historical icons to redefine a national narrative. Additionally, the premiere facilitated the return of Griselda Gambaro, the playwright, and one of the main actors, Lautaro Murúa, to Argentina. Gambaro had been forced into exile in Barcelona after the military regime had blacklisted her work, deeming it immoral, subversive, obscene, and unpatriotic.16 Murúa returned from exile to play the role of Benigno, the character resembling Rosas. Rosas is not named explicitly in La malasangre, but the play contains a repertoire of signs and symbols belonging to that particular historical era, and almost all theatre critics and scholars who have

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reviewed the play make the association with the dictator openly.17 The palette of reds that is called for in the stage design and costumes, the constant mention of “melones,” and the idyllic city, smaller, but free of tyranny and lying just on the other side of the river, are all clear references to the Rosas period.18 Benigno’s henchman, Fermín, chants in mazorquero style: “salvajes, inmundos, asquerosos” [savage, filthy, disgusting ones] throughout the play, a slogan taken from the Rosas regime that was aimed toward his unitarian opponents. The play unfolds in 1840 and portrays a family that consists of a cruel, despotic father (Benigno), a submissive, complicit mother, and a rebellious daughter (Dolores). Fermín is Benigno’s sinister right-hand man, and Rafael is the earnest tutor who is hired to instruct Dolores in a variety of subjects, although her suitor, Pedro de los Campos Dorados, sees no need for his future wife to be educated any further, boasting that he will teach her everything she needs to know (101). Benigno ostensibly hires Rafael because of his spine deformation in order to ensure that his daughter does not fall in love with him. Allusion is made to the grisly fate (ordered by Benigno and sealed by Fermín) of Dolores’s previous tutor because of the romantic interest that had developed between them. Dolores is initially reproachful toward Rafael and treats him cruelly, but she eventually falls in love and they devise a plan to escape to the city across the river. This plan is destroyed when Benigno finds out and orders that Rafael be killed. In the last scene, Dolores demands to see Rafael. Fermín enters carrying Rafael’s lifeless body and places him onstage. Dolores approaches Rafael’s body solemnly and kneels down by his side. Overwhelmed by rage, she yells at her mother and Fermín to leave her alone: “(salvaje): ¡Fuera! ¡Quiero estar sola! ¡Decíle gracias! ¡Le agradezco que me permita mirar a mi muerto! Pero no quiero llantos a mi alrededor! ¡Llanto hipócrita! ¡Fuera!” [(savage): Get out! I want to be alone! Tell him thank you. I appreciate him letting me see the dead body of my loved one. But I do not want to hear sobbing. Hypocritical sobs! Get out!] (109). At this point her father, Benigno, enters: “¿Quién grita? Dolores, no me gustan los gritos. No me dejan pensar. Vamos a dormir todos, ¿eh? Ni hablaremos de esto. Nos bebemos una taza de chocolate y . . .” [Who is screaming? Dolores, I don’t like screaming. It makes it impossible to think. Let’s go to bed, all right? We won’t even talk about this. We’ll just have a cup of hot chocolate and . . .] (109). Dolores’s famous last lines, as she is being dragged from the stage by Fermín

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are: “¡El silencio grita! ¡Yo me callo pero el silencio grita!” [Silence screams. I may be quiet, but silence screams] (109). Dolores’s demands that Rafael’s body be returned to her and the appearance of his body onstage at the end of the performance were powerful in late 1982, the moment referred to specifically as the “show del horror”19 when mass graves were being uncovered throughout Argentina and for the first time the carnage became a present and immediate reality.20 Hand in hand with this exposure of horror and the introduction of disturbing images for the first time in public discourse came the extreme frivolity that characterized the summer of 1983, when, as Novaro and Palermo report cynically, the famous Uruguayan vacation spot of Argentina’s elite, Punta del Este, had little problem accommodating the terrifying accounts that surfaced, often involving repressors who were right there on the beach enjoying their vacations (109). This powerful end scene of La malasangre showcases some of the main trends and impulses in national memory discourses that would be influential in the following decades and, above all, highlights the polarization and explosive juxtaposition of these coexisting discourses. In preparation for life after the dictatorship, the military in 1983 issued the Final Document and the Law of National Pacification (referred to commonly as the Self Amnesty Law), which military officials hoped would quietly legitimate their immunity. These selfgenerated strategies of absolution were met with indignation and massive opposition. Even the leaders of the Catholic church, conspicuously silent throughout the dictatorship, declared the military’s swiftly drafted postregime laws and documents to be morally deficient in addressing the crimes committed.21 Just as Dolores rejects hypocritical tears, a large portion of Argentine society was unwilling to accept reconciliation as a possible solution to remedy the grave injustices committed during the dictatorship. The denunciatory portrayal of one of Argentina’s most controversial national figures triggered the reaction by the gun-toting pro-Rosas radicals that memorable evening. Reference to this emblematic historical figure unleashed a flood of sentiment regarding perceptions of history and alliances to versions of nationhood. Tulio Halperín Donghi wonders why Gambaro chose to allude to this particular episode in Argentine history in her dramatic piece when, in his opinion, what Argentine society needed during that transitional moment was innovative, constructive approaches to the relationship between the past

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and the present, and not the predictable return to the period of the Rosas dictatorship and the accompanying discourses, such as caudillismo, barbarism and civilization, and liberal versus revisionist versions of history.22 Notwithstanding Halperín Donghi’s constructive criticism, Rosas made a reappearance in other genres as well. María Luisa Bemberg turned to a well-known episode in Argentina’s history in her internationally acclaimed film Camila (1984), which provided a melodramatic account of the transgressive love affair between the daughter of an upper-class, conservative pro-Rosas family (Camila) and the local priest (Uladislao), and their subsequent execution, ordered by Rosas, in 1848. The Camila O’Gorman story has achieved mythical status in Argentina through its constant and frequent representation and revision over the last 150 years. With the exception of Ricardo Monti’s nonrealist Una pasión sudamericana (1989), almost all versions of the historical event end in the violent scene of the pair’s execution by the firing squad. For example, Bemberg’s Camila constructs intense audience identification with characters throughout the film, but ultimately ensures spectators’ exclusion from the awe-inspiring “tragic” outcome. The resulting cathartic release is significant to consider in tandem with certain self-preserving discourses that gained currency during the transitional years. For example, Novaro and Palermo argue that the frequently cited “doctrine of two demons” (la doctrina de los dos demonios)—the theory that erroneously claimed that armed forces and guerrilla militants had been engaged in commensurate, bilateral warfare during the military dictatorship—somewhat indirectly allowed the general public to establish their positions on the sidelines, as spectators who remained separate from and thus ethically removed from the state’s repressive apparatus.23 Similarly, Halperín Donghi questions when allusive strategies (revival of the Rosas era) become elusive (failure to address and analyze immediate context of dictatorship).24 Are works such as Gambaro’s La malasangre and Bemberg’s Camila complicit in preserving the audience’s invulnerability through decontextualized representations? In Gambaro’s defense, La malasangre was envisioned and premiered under dictatorship, so recourse to metaphor was a necessary strategy and not an unconscious attempt to elude acknowledgment of the dictatorial context.25 And certainly, if Gambaro had wanted to avoid conflict, she never would have chosen Rosas, one of Argentina’s

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most charged historical figures, frequently invoked to advance diverse political agendas in the present. For over a century he has enjoyed quite a vibrant posthumous life, kept “alive” through perceived continuities and newly forged alliances with the figure. The irresolution surrounding Rosas’s role in Argentine history has made the signs, symbols, and gestures dating from the nineteenth-century regime permanent fixtures in contemporary politics and culture.

Official Theatre under Rosas

The symbolism of the Rosas period is still strongly etched in the Argentine imagination in both denunciatory and glorifying terms, due at least in part to the fact that the dictator and his cohorts expertly manipulated theatricality during his regime to influence society’s vision of national identity and history. As a counterpoint to the contemporary focus of this chapter, a brief glance at official theatre under Rosas reveals the ways the regime used ceremony and ritual to regulate behavior and create a semblance of national consensus under authoritarian conditions. The official, propagandistic plays produced in theatres under Rosas alternated between excessive idolatry of the federal leader and harsh condemnation of dissidents.26 Although many of the works from the Rosas period are lost, critical reception of the official plays staged during Rosas’s regime exposes how theatre and theatricality contributed to consolidate the federal version of nationhood. The following excerpt from the daily newspaper Diario de la Tarde describes the improvised scene outside of the theatre house after the performance of the play Virtud y valor premiados (Virtue and Courage Rewarded) by Miguel García Fernández, staged in 1851. This post-performance spectacle was conceived of as homage to the general and dedicated to Rosas’s daughter, Manuelita, who upon exiting the theatre was greeted by the following display: Un vistoso carro triunfal se había colocado a las puertas del Teatro, adornado de vistosas banderas nacionales y federales, conteniendo en el frente principal el retrato de S. E. el General Rosas, circulado de preciosas guirnaldas de flores; caprichosas iluminaciones daban brillo a aquella escena magnífica y las lúcidas Bandas de Música de los Batallones 4 de Patricios y Serenos tocaban himnos federales. Todo ese suntuoso espectáculo fue

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ofrecido por el inmenso círculo de ciudadanos que lo había improvisado, a la Señorita Doña Manuelita Rosas de Ezcurra, a su salida del Teatro.27 [A triumphant, attractive carriage had been placed in front of the theatre doors, adorned with attractive Argentine and federal flags that served as a backdrop for His Excellency General Rosas’s portrait, which was trimmed with precious floral wreaths; whimsical candlelight illuminated the magnificent scene. The attentive music bands of the Battalions (4 de Patricios and Serenos) played federal hymns. This entire sumptuous spectacle was improvised by an immense circle of citizens that greeted Doña Manuelita Rosas de Ezcurra as she exited the theatre.]

Emphasis on decorative aspects, religious imagery, and the extreme deference made to the general achieve a near fetishization of the nation and its symbolic father. Reference to the “immense circle of citizens” that spontaneously mobilizes to produce the shrine seeks to show that citizens were well versed in the social rituals that governed their roles in society as both spectators and obedient participants. The excerpt suggests that citizens were trained and had rehearsed sufficiently to know that a homage to the general entailed the assembly of a large portrait of the leader, with bright red ribbons, wreaths, candles, and a band playing the national federalist hymn. The proximity of the “spontaneous gathering” to the threshold of the theatre attests to the “porosity” or “slipperiness”28 of the boundaries between the inner theatre and outer urban spaces, particularly under Rosas, when official theatre merged almost seamlessly with the ceremonies and festivals held to commemorate Rosas in communal spaces. Another review from the same newspaper covers the ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of Rosas’s ascension to power, held right before the theatrical performance. The review describes this highly political act, featuring Pedro Lacasa, Rosas’s unconditional right-hand man and propaganda minister: Al levantarse el telón aparecieron en escena los Señores Aficionados vestidos en traje en que iban a representar y en el mismo momento la orquesta tocó una marcha majestuosa y empezó a aparecer una hermosa nube, en la que descendió vestido de Fama el señor Lacasa y dio los vivas y mueras siguientes: Viva la Confederación Argentina! Viva nuestro ilustre Restaurador de las Leyes! Viva el gran día 13 de abril! Vivan todos los federales, fieles hijos de la libertad! ¡Mueran los inmundos salvajes unitarios Padejón, Rivera, Manco Paz, imbécil Ferrer y traidor Mascarilla!29

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[When the curtain rose there appeared onstage the costumed players. At the same time the orchestra began to play a majestic march and Pedro Lacasa descended from a gorgeous cloud and sang the following chants: Long live the Argentine Confederation! Long live our illustrious Restorer of Laws! Long live April 13! Long live the federals, loyal children of liberty. Die filthy, savage unitarians Padejón, Rivera, Manco Paz, imbecile Ferrer, and traitor Mascarilla.]

Here, against a backdrop of perfectly synchronized orchestra music and costumed players, Lacasa dramatically descends from a stage cloud and proclaims the federal adherents to be loyal children of freedom who should long live, while referring to the unitarian supporters as savage imbecile traitors who should die. The rituals of theatre and politics conflated to include commemoration of Rosas and the nation as a part of the theatre-going experience. In his study of theatre under Rosas, Raúl Castagnino documents the dance that took place in celebration of the revolution on May 25, 1841, at the Teatro Victoria, the seat of Rosas’s official theatre.30 According to reviews, after the performances and in presence of General Rosas and his daughter Manuelita, a gentleman in the audience made the suggestion of turning the theatrical space into a dance hall, and after approval spectators danced the night away in what was recorded as “un encantador fin para el 25 de mayo” [an enchanting finale to the 25 of May].31 For Castagnino, this picturesque event exemplifies how all public activities were perfectly absorbed into the Rosas apparatus.32 Rituals and ceremonies that usually took place outside of the theatre doors invaded theatrical space. In inverse fashion, characters from plays also stepped out of (or were dragged from) their theatrical space onto the city streets, as in the performance described below. Premiered on the eve of Rosas’s downfall, Pedro Lacasa wrote his “subtly” named El entierro del loco traidor, salvaje unitario Urquiza (The Burial of the Crazy Traitor, Savage Unitarian Urquiza, 1851), to deter potential Urquiza supporters and their attempts to overthrow the Rosas regime. In this play, Urquiza is portrayed as an ex-federal who, under the influence of European intellectuals, turns “loco” (crazy) and betrays Rosas. At the end of the play spectators behead a mannequin of Urquiza onstage and carry the “remains” in a makeshift coffin offstage and to the police headquarters, where they burn the mannequin amid festive activities, music, and firecrackers (487). The transport of the spectacle from the stage to the street, from the inner, dramatic frame

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to the outer, policed frame shows how performance can cross borders, in this case to consolidate authoritarian power and official discourse. Under Rosas, the embodiment of Urquiza and the enactment of his beheading, followed by the procession and his eventual burial, reinforced the cult of fear and the threat of violence to potential dissidents. The most fascinating element in this play is the burning and burial of the effigy of Urquiza that is performed at the end of the theatrical representation and outside of the theatre. Again, as in the La malasangre incident, a performance that begins inside transgresses theatre borders to create an ambiguous fictive/real space outside. Through performing this murder, burning, and burial, Rosas’s supporters hoped to prevent Urquiza’s imminent ascension to power and “bury” his rebellion. However, in spite of these spectacular attempts, Urquiza swiftly replaced Rosas as governor in 1852. The Menemist nineties (1989–1999) provide an excellent case study for the analysis of the tensions produced between the political manipulation of cathartic discourse and counterstrategies, used by human rights groups, political parties, and artists, to reject and invalidate gestures of reconciliation. The repatriation ceremony of Rosas’s remains marks one of the most emblematic moments of Carlos Menem’s presidency. The perfectly choreographed, heavily publicized event took place in October 1989, three months after Menem took office and one week before he signed the first round of presidential pardons (indultos) of military officials. Without a doubt, Menem viewed the reburial of Rosas as an opportunity to “bury” the dictatorial past, unite the nation, and establish a forward-looking government, an agenda one journalist described as an “atrociously sincere”33 attempt to proclaim closure and impose reconciliation through neoliberal policies and celebration of material excess. Menem was not the first to advocate for the return of Rosas’s remains. In fact, the impetus behind Rosas’s repatriation can be traced to the early 1930s, during which time Argentina’s nationalist movement became consolidated and a repatriation committee was created (1934) with the explicit objective of returning Rosas to Argentina from England.34 Historical revisionism privileges Rosas as the founding father of the Argentine nation, as opposed to the more longstanding and liberal version of Argentine history, which begins with the liberator José de San Martín and the Declaration of Independence in 1816. Those who align themselves with the liberal version view the Rosas

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period as a tragic, aberrant interlude in the progressive task of nation building, and those who side with Rosas deem essential a “return to tradition, to the past, to sentiments authentically Argentine,” a return to origins whose roots are ultimately Catholic, xenophobic, and authoritarian.35 The former Argentine ambassador to Great Britain, revisionist, and author of La repatriación de Rosas, Manuel de Anchorena offers an autobiographical account of his involvement in the historical mission to repatriate Rosas. According to Anchorena, in 1974 Juan Perón commissioned him to complete two fundamental tasks as ambassador: (1) to work on diplomatic relations regarding Malvinas/Falklands and (2) to repatriate Rosas.36 Anchorena states that in May 1975 he received approval for repatriation from the British foreign office, but four months later the plan was postponed indefinitely by the Argentine Chancellery because of political unrest in Buenos Aires on the eve of the military coup (56–57). Shortly after Menem assumed power in 1989, Anchorena approached him and again proposed the possibility of Rosas’s repatriation as a gesture of good faith and means toward repairing diplomatic relations with Great Britain. Menem responded positively, but somewhat ambiguously, relating only that he had longed for the day of Rosas’s repatriation since his childhood (85). The ceremony was planned to commemorate the repatriation of Rosas’s remains from Southampton, England, his place of exile until his death in 1877 (a significant transfer of patrimony if one considers the ongoing dispute over Malvinas/Falklands). The repatriation of Rosas’s remains to Argentina was conceived of as a return to his origins in order to close an unfinished chapter in Argentine history and complete the puzzle of national identity with a missing piece that Rosas’s body would fill. Under no circumstances was the act to be considered a funeral. Official statements issued from the Menemist government emphasized that the ceremony should be considered a cause for celebration in a festive atmosphere, and not for mourning; funeral marches would be replaced by the fanfare accorded to visiting dignitaries and heads of state.37 An entire weekend of activities was meticulously scripted for Argentines, including numerous patriotic speeches and a mass of “national unity” held before the National Flag Monument in Rosario. The body’s itinerary was quite remarkable. Beginning in Rosario, it made its way via the Río de la Plata to Buenos Aires, where the coffin was unloaded from the ship against the backdrop

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of a twenty-one-gun salute, the release of doves, and the national hymn.38 The body was then placed in a carriage and led down the most emblematic streets of Buenos Aires on the way to the Recoleta cemetery. The procession was accompanied by 5,000 gauchos, grenadiers, and members of the federal police force on horseback.39 Through this description, Menem’s objectives of conveying national unity, celebration, and a sense of closure are made crystal clear. La Nación quotes Menem as stating, Al dar la bienvenida al país al brigadier general don Juan Manuel de Rosas no deseo encender o desempolvar viejas polémicas. Quiero que despidamos al país viejo, malgastado, anacrónico, absurdo, y porque la historia debe ser una gran maestra de vida, queremos inaugurar un tiempo de síntesis, sin exclusiones.40 [As we welcome back Brigadier General Juan Manuel de Rosas, I do not wish to reignite or revisit old controversies. I want us all to bid farewell to the old country—tired, absurd, and obsolete—because history should serve as a great lesson in life, and we want to inaugurate a time of synthesis, without exclusions.]

Menem conceived of the repatriation ceremony as a platform from which to unleash his memory (amnesia) politics and to prepare the Argentine public for the presidential pardons he would sign a week later. Thus in the final farewell to Rosas, emphasis is placed on the departure from an old and obsolete era, and the inauguration of a time of synthesis and consensus. At another moment, Menem admits that there are still open wounds and employs a surgical metaphor in a promise to remedy them:41 Estamos así cerrando un capítulo de historia con muchos desencuentros y otras tantas frustraciones . . . Todavía quedan algunas heridas por cerrar y yo, presidente de los argentinos, me comprometo ante Dios y ante mi pueblo suturar definitivamente esas heridas, para que a partir de la unidad nacional marchemos hacia la patria que soñaron Juan Manuel de Rosas, los grandes hombres y caudillos que nacieron en esta tierra de promisión.42 [We are closing a chapter of history filled with mishaps and many other frustrations . . . There still remain some open wounds and I, president of Argentina, promise before God and my people to suture these wounds definitively, so that from a united nation we work together to build the patria dreamed of by Juan Manuel de Rosas, the great men, and caudillos who were born in this promised land.]

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As Menem sought to “heal” the nation through the recovery and repatriation of one historically charged, lost body (Rosas), he simultaneously offered amnesty to those who were responsible for the disappearance of thousands of bodies under the most recent dictatorship. Despite the efficacy of bodies to advance political agendas, to serve as symbols for healing and unity, and to revise history, their manipulation as substitutes can generate ethical concerns. Joseph Roach writes that performance is no less than “the process of trying out various candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins.”43 To what extent might Rosas perform a stand-in for something else? Certainly, Rosas cannot stand for everything that Argentina has lost and has been unable to recover, from Malvinas to the thousands of those who disappeared under dictatorship, yet clearly the embodiment of historical figures and ceremonial events are linked to recovery and restitution of bodies and national identity in ways that must resonate with Argentina’s recent dictatorial past. The Menemist government framed the event as a ceremony of reconciliation in which Rosas’s body became the recipient for the nation’s charged conflicts and injuries. In Freudian fashion, Menem seeks to assert his own paternal authority as leader of the nation and subdue fraternal rivalries through burial of the primal father, Rosas.44 Rupture and continuity are the goals of this ceremony, achieved through the act of burial and the paternal continuity established through the symbolic transfer of power from Rosas to Menem. Discourses of sacrifice and substitution intersect strategically in the repatriation ceremony to detract attention away from unaddressed impunity. To René Girard, detraction is an essential component in effecting strategies of substitution: “Sacrificial substitution implies a degree of misunderstanding. Its vitality as an institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based.”45 In the case of the repatriation ceremony of Rosas’s body, this displacement allows for the consolidation of a double discourse consisting of officially recognized, state-sponsored reconciliation, on the one hand, and suppressed, officially unrecognized injustice, on the other. Ernst Kantorowicz’s observations of the king’s two bodies (one political, one natural) in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French and English funerary rites provide insight to understanding Menem’s relationship to repatriation and to Argentina’s legacy

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of omnipotent rulers.46 Discussing succession in sixteenth-century France, Kantorowicz writes, “The individual king may die, but the King who represents sovereign Justice and was represented by the supreme judges, was not dead; he continued his jurisdiction ceaselessly through the agency of his officers even though his natural body had passed away.”47 Kantorowicz goes on to note that jurisdiction continued until burial of the king, at which point a successor could assume power (423). When applied to a contemporary context, this statement conveys the significance of the repatriation ceremony in Argentina, in which bodies become polarized, materially and discursively, in the enactment of power relations. Through the repatriation ceremony of Rosas, Menem attempts to break with an authoritarian genealogy while safeguarding his succession (and inheritance) of power. Juan Manuel de Rosas and Evita and Juan Perón are a few of the main examples of polemical national figures whose bodies, after death, continue to leverage significant influence as symbols of conflicting collective interests and identities. In her book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery identifies reasons why dead bodies are particularly effective symbols. First of all, she observes, “they don’t talk much on their own,” and the words they may have uttered in life can be taken out of context to satisfy the political objective at hand.48 Yet, as Verdery points out, “because they have a single name and a single body, they present the illusion of having only one significance” (29). In addition, there is a self-referential element involved in one’s own inevitable identification with bodies utilized as symbols (33). Most important, according to Verdery, “a body’s materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy: unlike notions of ‘patriotism’ or ‘civil society,’ for instance, a corpse can be moved around, displayed, and strategically located in specific places. Bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless transcends time, making past immediately present” (28). Argentina proves to be a rich case study for analysis of the posthumous movement of famous bodies and their manipulation by political agents in different contexts. The itinerary of Eva Perón’s body is perhaps the most remarkable. Upon her premature death at age thirty-three, President Juan Perón ordered the embalmment of her body, which was then held at the headquarters of the largest Peronist union organization, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT/Confederación General de Trabajo) until the overthrow of

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Perón in 1955 and his subsequent expulsion from Argentina to Spain, at which time Eva’s body was removed and in 1957 was “exiled” to a cemetery in Milán, where her body was buried under a false name for thirteen years. Paola Cortés Rocca and Martín Kohan discuss the irony surrounding the fact that Eva Perón’s body was exiled after death, and Juan Perón, exiled in Madrid for eighteen years, was repatriated while still alive in 1973.49 Juan Perón returned but did not bring Eva’s body with him in 1973, and in September 1974 a group of militant Peronist Montoneros kidnapped the cadaver of General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, the general who had orchestrated Perón’s overthrow in 1955, and demanded that Eva’s remains be returned to Argentina in exchange for his whereabouts. The pawns in all of these arrangements, deals, and exchanges are the bodies of political figures, whose lives become more politicized after death than during their lifetimes. Juan Perón’s body did not fare well either: in early October 1987, newspapers began to report that his grave had been pillaged. San Martín’s sword was stolen from the tomb, along with several other personal items. Most shocking of all was the theft of his hands, whose whereabouts remain a mystery to this day. In her article “Las manos de la memoria” Guber discusses the political climate that surrounded the crime, the hypotheses that were proposed to explain it, the political manipulation of the event, and the vastly disparate perspectives that evolved as a result. Perón’s body became a signifier of reconciliation or conflict, depending on the objectives of political appropriation. President Alfonsín attempted to portray the trauma inflicted on Perón’s body as a reason to bring all Argentines together in harmonious support of the leader and the democratic cause.50 The Peronist candidate for governor, Antonio Cafiero, however, felt that the defilement of Perón’s cadaver was an attempt to undermine the Peronist movement by rendering it fragmented and mutilated.51 Furthermore, Guber notes that the tomb raiders were almost never referred to as such; rather, they were called montoneros or golpistas, political designations that were not only historically charged but also represented opposed ideologies.52 The plot unfolds with the repatriation of Rosas’s remains in 1989, an almost unremarkable development in the saga of ransacked tombs and itinerant bodies, in a country where, as Tomás Eloy Martínez muses, unsettled graves seem to multiply.53 Also relevant are some of the major global events of 1989, such as the fall of the Soviet Union

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and the collapse of the Berlin Wall—upheavals that ushered in ideological changes and heightened awareness of the reterritorialization of national spaces. In 1989 the question of whether to remove Lenin’s body from public viewing at the Mausoleum in Red Square and give him a proper burial was hotly debated by party opponents and supporters alike.54 The 1989 repatriation ceremony of Rosas’s remains enacts both Argentine history and these global revisions, particularly as they relate to Menem’s neoliberal agenda, an economic program he referred to as “cirugía mayor sin anestesia” [major surgery without anesthesia]. In this oft-cited quote, Menem invokes the body as an analogy for the nation that must be dissected and rearticulated through financial reform coded as painful surgery. Fusing body politics and economic rhetoric, Menem privatized (expatriated) many of Argentina’s national industries (YPF, Aerolíneas Argentinas, Entel, etc.) while he simultaneously repatriated a historical figure and symbol for national sovereignty (Rosas), who, in a curious twist of fate, had championed an antiliberal, isolationalist economic policy during his nineteenth-century tenure.55 Ironically, though Menem advocated for an alert, anesthesia-free confrontation of the country’s economic woes, in the political sphere he prescribed anesthesia as a way to numb the senses and embrace the discourse of closure and reconciliation that he would make a cornerstone of his politics. Hugo Vezzetti has written extensively on the psychosocial effects of this consciously enforced closure in Argentina’s postdictatorial period. Citing Freud’s model, he remarks, “Lo que en la experiencia corriente es amnesia y desconocimiento, en otra escena, inconsciente, es recuerdo vivo, tan vivo que el síntoma repite y mantiene ese suceso como algo lleno e inmodificable” [That which in everyday experience is amnesia and oblivion, on another stage, unconscious perhaps, is raw memory, so alive that its symptoms repeat themselves and reveal that which is repressed to be present and unchangeable].56 Aside from the problematic connotations of an unconscious national stage, the description of Argentine society containing these superimposed planes of repression and raw memory evokes the structure of metadrama. Indeed, Menem’s theatrical approach to politics through the manipulation of ceremony and bodies makes the paradigm of metadrama particularly useful in our analysis of theatre’s relation to this context. Of special concern are these inner plays within Menem’s master play that heighten the tension between conflicting agendas, draw irony to

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political strategy, and make manifest the exploitation of performative techniques to redefine the past and present. Menem’s gestures of substitution and forced reconciliation through symbolic and literal burial of the past do not go unchallenged in other spheres. Indeed, just one month after the elaborate repatriation ceremony and Menem’s presidential pardons, the playwright Ricardo Monti resurrects the figure of Rosas in his play Una pasión sudamericana. Resurrecting Historical Bodies in Ricardo Monti’s Una pasión Sudamericana (1989)

The cult of the body, or predominance of a “somatic culture” in contemporary Argentina,57 finds expression in theatre, a genre that is inherently concerned with bringing together bodies and narratives onstage to transmit meaning. What does it mean when Rosas is resurrected in theatre, and what is the relationship between his onstage reappearance and his offstage burial? Rosas’s reburial and resurrection are both considered returns: one back to his grave, and one back to “life” as a character on the stage of the San Martín Theatre. In the repatriation ceremony Rosas’s body is “real” but not alive; onstage he is alive but not “real.” In both Rosas’s performances, asserting “realness” seems natural because of the embodied representation of a historical figure, and onstage bodies appear to be resistant to complete reduction to metaphor or symbol in a way characters in other fictional genres do not. Freddie Rokem writes that plays based on historical events “present characters who, even if they belong to the past, possess a reality or a veracity which does not exclusively confine them to the fictionality of the stage.”58 Both Rosas’s repatriation and his theatrical reappearance in 1989 belong to the same metadramatic framework of competing performances in which “real” bodies are involved in the reevaluation of national history, postdictatorial memory discourses, and Menemist politics. On November 9, 1989, roughly one month after Menem presides over the repatriation ceremony and signs the general pardons, the playwright Ricardo Monti resuscitates Rosas in the premiere of Una pasión sudamericana at the San Martín Theatre,59 injecting irony into Menem’s project of national harmony and celebration of historical amnesia. Described as a mystery in one act, Una pasión brings back Rosas and his involvement in the execution of Camila O’Gorman and

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Uladislao Gutiérrez to create a nonrealist, semiotically complex portrayal of the Rosas period in Argentine history. As in Gambaro’s La malasangre, the Rosas figure is not named but can be identified as such because of the specific political references his character makes, the mid-nineteenth-century setting that contextualizes the play, the power he wields in deciding the fate of Camila and Uladislao, and the authority his character exudes, described as “indiscutible” and “paralizante” (indisputable, paralyzing).60 The basic plot revolves around the character of the Brigadier (the Rosas figure) who, onstage at all times, waits till daybreak for battle to ensue between his troops and the “Loco”—an elusive offstage entity and intertextual hybrid assembled from discourses by the nineteenth-century statesmen Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Alberdi, and Juan Lavalle.61 During this waiting period the Brigadier also deliberates the fate of the offstage characters Camila O’Gorman and Uladislao Gutiérrez and ultimately decides to order their execution in spite of the aide-de-camp’s pleas for clemency. In Monti’s version, Camila and Uladislao’s child is saved, brought onstage in the last scene of the play, held out to the Brigadier as if an offering, while the sound of cannon fire and approaching battle can be heard in the background. Loosely inspired by the Divine Comedy, Monti’s Una pasión is structured around the realms of Infierno, Mundo, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Interspersed among these realms are the Brigadier’s discourses on barbarism and civilization and his dictations to his submissive, terrified scribes who memorize every word the Brigadier utters but write down only what he commands. The Brigadier, or Rosas figure, is depicted as a cunning and calculating individual on a civilizing mission who is acutely aware of the relationship between power, history, and the importance of creating official discourse through the careful and selective transcription of events. Envisioning himself as the center of the universe, he acts as a puppeteer, manipulating characters and demanding to be entertained. His decision to have the pair executed at the end of the play, seemingly arbitrary to his aide-de-camp, reflects, instead, the Brigadier’s pathological pragmatism in believing that in sacrificing the defiant couple he will preserve the civilizing endeavor. The romance between Camila and Uladislao is reenacted by the “locos”—four buffoonlike characters (Farfarello, San Benito, Murat, and Biguá) who, when called upon to act, snap out of their fitful sleep and represent farcical sketches for the Brigadier. The head

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“loco” Farfarello directs these carnivalesque scenes, which altogether constitute a play within the main play. A crucial character in building the play’s momentum and creating suspense is the Brigadier’s aide-decamp, described as an elderly man with “sangre de viejo” [old man’s blood], who throughout the course of the play constantly inquires into the fate of Camila and Uladislao. Another peculiar character is Barrabás, a menacing figure (described as a gaucho in the prologue) chained in a dark corner onstage, whose presence is first discovered by his “olor a muerte” [smell of death] (42). Almost all of the characters can be traced to historical or mythological figures extracted from their original contexts and brought together in Monti’s play. Una pasión sudamericana had a relatively short run at the San Martín Theatre that 1989 season, and critical reception was mixed. Reviews of the play illuminate the tension the premiere created between theatre and politics. Those critics who wrote more positive accounts focused overwhelmingly on the literary merit of the text. In less favorable reviews, critics reacted with exasperation to the enigmatic quality of the work. In El Economista the critic César Magrini wrote a scathing piece in which he calls Una pasión a waste of time because, at the end, Monti refuses to take sides.62 Ironically, while Magrini implies that Monti is guilty of avoiding historical responsibility, Horacio González, a critic for the Nuevo Sur, writes, “lo que ahora la escena pública calla, Una pasión sudamericana lo dice” [A South American Passion Play says what the public sphere silences].63 González writes, “Los excelentes actores que la ponen en la Sala Martín Coronado del San Martín encarnan vivamente los rastros de un lenguaje que el teatro le da a la historia y que ahora un clima político agobiante intenta sustraer, cerrando por decreto el libro de debates argentinos” [The superb actors who perform the work in the Martín Coronado theatre at the San Martín embody a part of history onstage that the current stifling political climate has tried to remove in their attempt to close the book and end debates on Argentine history] (20). As Osvaldo Pellettieri notes, audiences were uneasy with the ambiguous depiction of Rosas under their newly elected leader (Menem) who clearly saw himself as an heir to Rosas in his style of populist politics, not to mention his sideburns.64 One of Monti’s trademarks as a dramatist is his inventive use of role-playing, intertextuality, ritual, and self-reference. His dramaturgy highlights the processes of representing history and the

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numerous agents involved in generating and manipulating power through metatheatrical convention. Beatriz Trastoy considers Monti to be an overlooked pioneer of metadrama in Argentine theatre whose attention to role-playing, ritual, and self-reference has been appropriated by dramatists and made central in contemporary theatre of the late eighties and nineties.65 One of Monti’s most metadramatic plays, Una pasión sudamericana incorporates historical and intertextual allusions, poetic interludes, role-playing, and self-reference in such a way that the production and reception of history become indistinguishable from the onstage role plays, ceremonies, and musical performances dictated by the master of ceremonies himself, the Brigadier. In fact, both the Brigadier and Farfarello have directorial roles in Una pasión, and they constantly make references to the act of representation and the fact that they are performing. The Brigadier directs action occurring in the larger, more encompassing dramatic frame, and Farfarello directs the “locos,” the characters who enact sketches that belong to the inner play. Early on, the aide-de-camp timidly asks the Brigadier if he had thought anymore about the fate of Camila, “esa niña” [that girl], after which the Brigadier responds furiously: “¿Pero qué tengo que ver yo con ese enredo? ¿Soy un autor de comedias, acaso?” [But what do I have to do with this mess? By chance do I look like a playwright?] (40). In another scene the aide-de-camp asks the Brigadier if he would like Farfarello to stop reciting verses and the Brigadier answers, “¡Hombre! ¿qué tiene contra el teatro?” [Hey! what do you have against theatre?] (51). Monti’s Una pasión produces a complex system of framed performances, or plays within plays. The most basic, inner play is the most farcical and contains the action taking place in the four realms. It is also the most performative of the frames because it is where the “locos” play the roles of Camila and Uladislao and enact the scene of their seduction and love affair, in fluctuating registers that, at times chaste, erotic, and mystical, promise a sexual climax until the Brigadier abruptly calls off the performance. The role-playing of Camila and Uladislao in the inner play invokes their presence and reminds spectators of their centrality to the dramatic plot, but the fact that their characters are enacted by others also signals their absence in the outer play, the frame occupied by the Brigadier and the aide-de-camp. As the performances discussed here have shown, the presence and absence, and appearance and disappearance of bodies onstage can allude to

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competing histories and political interests and, above all, can signal the influence of agents, or “operatives” in positions of power invested in the transmission of a certain version of history or reality.66 Hayden White writes, “Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened.”67 If narrating contested history involves emplotment of a sequence of events in order to promote one version of the story, performing contested history involves embodiment of strategically placed figures onand offstage.68 Monti’s Una pasión displays not only the mechanisms behind the emplotment of history but also those behind the embodiment of history in the portrayal of Rosas, and the disembodiment of history, in the absence of the characters Camila and Uladislao in the outer play. The founding binaries of nineteenth-century Argentina (barbarism/civilization, provinces/Buenos Aires, federals/unitarians, Rosas/ Sarmiento, nationalists/liberals, etc.) reinforce irresolution as a national trait, and critics variously interpret the constant reassertion of the era in contemporary culture and politics as a haunting, traumainduced repetition compulsion or, contrarily, a nostalgic, revisionist evocation of an idyllic era. A substantial amount of scholarship has focused on the interpretive genealogies that have formed as a result of the constant revisiting, recycling, and recontextualizing of nineteenthcentury motifs in Argentina. In her book Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture, Diana Sorensen writes, “It is interesting to see how national identity can be observed from the vantage point of a classic and its readings, how they constitute a repertory of conflicting interpretations, and the extent to which polemics can provide a model for understanding cultural formation.”69 Less attention, however, has been given to reinterpretations of historical figures, specifically as they are embodied in conventional theatre, offstage ceremonies, rituals, and urban interventions. In Una pasión, of all the centrally featured binaries (light/dark, passion/reason, civilization/barbarism, writing/performance of history, apocalypse/renaissance, unitarians/federals), one of the most pronounced divisions is between closed and open spaces both onstage and in the dramatic imagination. The introductory didascalias indicate that the stage space should encompass a closed-off hall of an old, colonial ranch in the provinces of Buenos Aires. Sparsely decorated, the

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windows are to be kept “hermetically sealed” throughout the performance; two doors, one to the right and one left of the stage, provide a connection to the outside world and offstage dramatic space, inhabited by the “loco,” Camila and Uladislao, and others.70 This offstage dramatic space represents nothing less than the entirety of the nation.71 From descriptions throughout the play and the Brigadier’s own proclamations, this ambiguous national space recalls the nineteenth-century Pampa—barbarous, expansive, and the future site for the project of a civilized nation in the mind’s eye of the men of “The Generation of ’37.” The offstage dramatic space is described as wet, muddy, infested with fever, and according to the Brigadier, it is like an animal in slumber in perpetual darkness.72 At another point, the Brigadier says, “Acá gringo, Dios no terminó de soplar. La Creación está en el horno . . . ¿Y el sentido de todo? ¡Vaya uno a saber! Lo estamos inventando” [Here gringo, God never finished. Genesis is still in the making . . . And what sense is there to all of this? Who knows! We are inventing it] (52). One effect of the tight insularity of the stage space and the Brigadier’s overbearing presence in it is that the offstage, quasinational space seems to be but a figment of his imagination, similar to the imagination described and demythified by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada in his seminal Radiografía de la Pampa (1933), in which the pampa is exposed as “una ilusión; es la tierra de las aventuras desordenadas en la fantasía del hombre sin profundidad” [an illusion; it is the land of disorganized adventures in the fantasy world of a man without profundity].73 The offstage, dramatic space in Una pasión encompasses the nineteenth-century national imaginary—infinite, imagined, utopian and apocalyptic, the place of projected dreams, the site of battle between civilization and barbarism, the promised land, the symbol of failure and dashed hopes—in sum, an impressive borderless memoryscape. Monti’s play heightens awareness of the intermingling of contexts, spaces, and imaginaries on- and offstage in such a way that the Brigadier character and the repatriated Rosas seem at once to participate in the same performative context, in which ceremony and role-playing are the primary modes for emplotting, embodying, and empowering a chosen version of history. Questions arise regarding the comparative agency of these performances in achieving political and aesthetic objectives: as Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o writes, “The war between art and the state is really a struggle between the power of performance

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in the arts and the performance of power by the state—in short, enactments of power.”74 This argument would place the official repatriation of Rosas and his theatrical resurrection in Una pasión in opposition to each other, engaged in the struggle for power and authority. This happens to an extent; the simultaneous acts of state-sponsored burial and artistic revival support this idea of competing claims and contradictory discourses. Monti’s Brigadier character seems to parody the simplicity with which Menem establishes his own civilizing mission through the discourse of imposed closure and his rewriting of history through the dictation of the presidential pardons. But Monti makes this direct opposition difficult. In his play, suffused with irony, historical anachronisms, and metadrama, the playwright seems uninterested in countering or promoting any one version or account of history or the nation. Monti had already begun writing the play during the dictatorship and he only finished in the late eighties,75 so he could hardly have had in mind the uncanny timing of the resurrection of the Rosas figure in his 1989 premiere, and he certainly could not have imagined that audiences might perceive a less campy, more sinister version of Menem in his Brigadier character. And as Graham-Jones reminds us, “Monti took great pains to distance Una pasión sudamericana from its own historical subject” (23). He opens the text to broader interpretations of America and modernism through presentation of nineteenth-century tropes such as barbarism, civilization, nation building, the depiction of power relationships, and historiography. However, the semiotic system Monti employs in the 1989 version of Una pasión is largely Argentine and consists of national indices, icons, and symbols, the most recognizable of which are the offstage characters Camila O’Gorman and Uladislao Gutiérrez. The presence/absence of these highly charged national signifiers affected the reception of the play and perhaps dissuaded use of a grander interpretive lens to approach the work. Reception is a primary process in negotiating the agency of performance. In Susan Bennett’s words, “It is at the nexus of production and reception that the spectator exists.”76 At this nexus spectators translate perceived material into a received message, and when discrepancies arise between the production and reception of meaning, it is necessary to turn to the audiences’ expectations, knowledge, needs, and desires in the specific context of the performance for potential explanations. In the reception of Una pasión, audiences were perhaps least prepared for

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Monti’s innovative ending, in which Camila and Uladislao’s newborn child is brought onto the stage and handed over to the Brigadier. This last scene departs radically from previous theatrical and cinematic representations of the event and brings to the fore genealogies of history, myth, and power in a very dramatic and provocative climax. Near the end of Una pasión, after the Brigadier has given the order for Camila and Uladislao’s execution, he states, “Con esto el Loco va a saber que yo también soy un civilizador” [With this the Loco will know I am also one who civilizes] (87). In Monti’s version of Camila, the pair is executed offstage, but their newborn baby is brought onstage and presented to the Brigadier as if an offering to him. Stage notes from the production at the San Martín Theatre emphasize that the newborn baby should appear extremely real, naked, and still covered with blood from the birth.77 The Brigadier tells his aide to cover the baby in a blanket amid sounds of approaching battle. The Brigadier then releases Barrabás, the barbarous giant who has been chained in

Una pasión sudamericana Credit line: Una pasión sudamericana by Ricardo Monti. Directed by Ricardo Monti. Teatro San Martín. Sala Martín Coronado, 1989. Actors: Luis Campos, Miguel Moyano, Ivan Moschner, Osvaldo Santoro, Derli Prada, Arturo Maly, Jorge Petraglia, Pedro Cano, Manuel Cruz, Augusto Kretschmar, Jorge Baza de Candia. Photographer: Carlos Flynn. Courtesy of Kive Staiff, and the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires.

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the corner throughout the play. In spite of countless adaptations of Camila’s story, no author had envisioned the birth of Camila and Uladislao’s child until Monti’s Una pasión. The birth of the child reinstates a lost genealogy, made visible through the onstage presentation of the child. According to Martín Rodríguez, the birth of the baby and the release of the monster onstage point to competing interpretations of renaissance and apocalypse, and similarly, Pellettieri maintains that even if an interpretation of societal rebirth could be made in this play, it would be troubled and charged with irony.78 The offering of the baby onstage at the end of Monti’s play holds significant relevance when analyzed within the broader historical framework and political context of the premiere, particularly as it relates to the manipulation of the presence and absence of bodies and history. The onstage appearance of the orphaned child, whose parents have been executed offstage, and the offering of that child to the parents’ executioner in the closing scene, is a disturbing image that evokes associations with the disappearance of parents and the criminal appropriation of their children by the military regime under the dictatorship. Instead of denouncing the criminality behind the appropriation and offering of the child, however, Monti’s ending suggests that the power structures and impunity are still securely in place. And yet, though the ending scene may signal the enduring influence of authoritarianism, the image of the Brigadier with the child in his arms also foreshadows a strategy devised by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which allowed them to continue to prosecute the military after the amnesty laws. In the trial of 1985 kidnapping had not been included in the charges against the senior military generals because the practice was not considered “systematic.”79 The legal scholar Lisa Avery explains that the unforeseen result of this omission was that the amnesties issued during the mid-eighties and Menem’s general pardons in 1989 and 1990 also did not cover kidnapping (257). Consequently, the Abuelas argued that if they could provide evidence of the systematic appropriation of children by the military regime, they would be able to legally prosecute members of the military for the first time for the crime of kidnapping their grandchildren. As Avery notes, this strategy proved effective and vindicated the struggle of the Abuelas when in 2000 an Argentine federal judge issued the arrest for six naval officers involved in organizing illicit adoptions from secret detention centers (257–258).

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As previously discussed, Menem’s repatriation ceremony returns a symbolic nineteenth-century father to the nation, while disavowing thousands of disappeared fathers through the signing of the general pardons, in order to grant immunity to yet another set of symbolic (fallen) fathers, the military officers. In a more recent interview, when asked about representations of authoritarianism and relationships of power in his work, Monti replies simply, “Seguramente, ahí, en el fondo, está el padre” [Certainly, at the heart of the issue is the father]80 The theatre scholars Néstor Tirri and Beatriz Trastoy recognize parricide as a central motif in Monti’s earlier work, especially in his Una noche con el señor Magnus e hijos (A Night with Mr. Magnus and his Children, 1971), in which both scholars view violence toward the father as a reflection of the generational rupture resulting from the student protests and general upheavals of 1968.81 A generation later, however, in Una pasión, the playwright turns to infanticide in the murder of the younger generation, represented by Camila and Uladislao. Intimidated by their youthful vigor and courage, the Brigadier has the pair executed and describes their deaths as a necessary sacrifice in order to complete the world he is trying to build. This kind of sacrificial discourse recalls the mid-twentieth-century classic, Leopoldo Marechal’s Antígona Vélez (1951), the pro-Peronist adaptation of Antigone, discussed in Chapter 2, in which Antígona and Lisandro are sacrificed so that future generations might “algún día, cosecha[r] en esta pampa el fruto de tanta sangre” [one day reap the harvest of the Pampa, born of so much blood].82 The ending of Una pasión presents an unsettling update of this dynamic of sacrifice through the offstage death of the parents and the onstage birth of the child, swaddled in the arms of the Brigadier onstage, who professes to be in the process of making his world. Although actors playing the roles of historical characters may possess a “realness” that defies the category of fiction, they rely on the protection of fictionality when personifying inflammatory historical figures onstage. Occasionally, audience members become so incensed by a historical depiction that they make a conscious and political decision to respond to the actors as if they were the actual historical figures. This conflation of bodies drove the group of nationalists to storm the stage and aim their guns at Lautaro Murúa in the performance of La Malasangre. And in an example from the nineteenth century, after Urquiza declared his intent to overthrow Rosas at the end of the

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regime, there appeared a series of anti-Urquiza performances; in one titled Juan sin Pena (Juan without Shame), for example, some spectators became so furious that they tried to hang the actor who played the role of Urquiza.83 Attempts to avoid a preprogrammed emotional response to the representation of historical figures in theatre motivated Monti to write the play Finlandia (2002), a rewriting of Una pasión and condensed version of the original play that has been stripped of all Argentine historical references. Monti reduces the number of characters and changes their names but leaves the general structure and plot of the drama intact; still the anxiety surrounding the fate of the girl and the priest offstage moves the drama along, and the ending scene produces the newborn child onstage. However, Monti completely extracts the nineteenth-century setting and chooses instead to situate the play in Finland during the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, trading in Argentine caudillos for Finnish nobility and replacing Argentine mud with Finnish snow. In an interview Monti states that one of the main reasons he chose Finland was the word “Finland” itself and its allusion to the end (fin) of the land, the last frontier before complete decontextualization of space and time.84 In Finlandia the playwright seeks to deflect critics’ insistence that he take sides in historical debates that are inevitably summoned in his Una pasión. What results is an original and alienating piece that dislocates and unnames the familiar historical characters who find themselves amid a quasi-foreign, semireal landscape on the verge of oblivion. Ahistorical Bodies : El hombre de arena (1992)

The decontextualization that alienates bodies and characters in Monti’s Finlandia prompts the question of what happens when bodies are taken out of context and made ahistorical in performance. What do these bodies represent, and how do audiences respond to them? The manipulation of historical figures in performance can provoke either a controlled collective reaction, as in the repatriation ceremony of Rosas, or a highly charged, uncontrolled reaction, as in the Malasangre incident. It can also provoke an intractable polarization and divisiveness in the reception of a work, as in Una pasión. The introduction of areferential bodies complements the presence of extremely politicized bodies

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on Argentina’s contemporary stages and gestures toward alternative aesthetics and strategies of interpreting the past. For example, in Daniel Veronese and Emilio García Wehbi’s El hombre de arena (1992), the action repeated compulsively onstage is the burying and unburying of bodies, represented by antique porcelain dolls with hollowed-out heads, which are extracted from the earth one by one and positioned in relation to one another, and to the puppeteers. Based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s romantic novella The Sandman, El hombre was envisioned by Veronese and Wehbi through their involvement in the object theatre group El Periférico de Objetos. Started in 1989, El Periférico de Objetos, according to Veronese,85 is profoundly interested in exploring the relationship between the “manipulator” and the manipulated object and making visible through theatre that which remains culturally invisible.86 In a conversation with Jorge Dubatti, Veronese remarks, “En cada espectáculo tratamos de explotar al máximo la presencia del manipulador en escena” [In each performance we try to exploit to an extreme the presence of the manipulator onstage].87 The group’s focus on the interaction between humans and dolls rejects the notion of puppetry as a form of ventriloquism and instead explores the relationship between humans and objects onstage to reexamine paradigms of the victim and the victimizer, subjectivity, and the double in theatre. In El hombre de arena, the dolls are ritually unearthed, reburied, and positioned to express a range of behavior; at times they are made to embrace each other tenderly, at others they are rocked back and forth frenetically, yet at other moments they are manipulated into a variety of sexual positions. The onstage puppeteers, or manipulators, appear dressed entirely in black, their faces partially disguised by thin gauzy veils. At moments their actions allude to the rituals of mourning as they cover their faces with their hands and light candles ceremoniously. At other moments, however, they inflict violence upon the dolls; in one scene a puppeteer produces a cord and strangles one of the dolls. In the middle of the stage is an enormous sandpit that sweeps up dusty earth during the performance, immersing audiences in a murky haze.88 Stage and audience space become one as spectators are intermittently doused with sand, at once functioning as witnesses to and subjects of the ceremonial burials. In general, the periphery of the stage remains dark except for the glow provided by the four or five candles and the stream of light that shines down directly on the sandbox.

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The use of this very focused light accentuates the hands of the puppeteers, the only exposed parts of their bodies not covered in black fabric. Their hands thus seem to meld with the puppets’ porcelain bodies in a flurry of luminous body parts. Somber music accompanies the puppeteers’ actions throughout most of the performance, although there are moments when the only sounds heard are the digging and sifting of the sand. The appeal to the senses, ritualistic elements, and emphasis on physical language—music, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, architecture, lighting, and scenery—recall Artaud’s viscerally provocative theatre.89 The presence of sand, puppets, and the menacing Coppelius character in Hoffmann’s original interact in the staging of El hombre to create a nightmarish dreamworld. Though perhaps not surprising, what has startled Veronese most about reception of El hombre de arena is spectators’ and critics’ readiness to interpret references to Argentina’s dictatorial past. Several reviewers of the play perceive an uncovering of stories and histories in the ceremonial unburying and burying of bodies onstage. Hilda Cabrera refers to the exorcistic qualities of the play, whose ultimate goal is to “desenterrar una historia tenebrosa” [disinter a tenebrous story/history].90 The critic Nina Cortese writes, “Surgiendo de la tierra, los personajes de la historia narrada por el grupo, reconstruyen una historia de pasiones y crímenes que se repiten inexorablemente” [Emerging from the earth, these characters, whose actions are narrated by the group of puppeteers, reconstruct a story/history filled with passions and crimes that are repeated inexorably].91 The playwright and director Alejandro Tantanián writes that of all of the Periférico plays, El hombre engages most powerfully with the horror of Argentina’s past, in spite of the lack of intention on the part of those involved in the staging.92 Likewise, Jorge Dubatti contends that Veronese’s theatre is political in its indirect but powerful evocation of the continuation of the effects of the most recent dictatorship into the present.93 El hombre is arguably the most profound exploration of Freud’s notion of the uncanny by the Periférico de Objetos: Veronese names synthesis, obsessive repetition, and obscenity (in the etymological sense) as the group’s foundational elements.94 The idea of the double is at work on various levels; the performance establishes double consciousness of experience—of what is repressed and hidden, on the one hand, and what is visibly manifested, on the other. The dolls assume different roles in the “doubling” of their manipulators.

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At times they appear to be extensions of their manipulators’ bodies, functioning together in perfect synchrony; at others, the dolls seem eerily autonomous; yet at others they are victimized by the hands that control them. Manipulators engage in a game of reassessment of the boundaries of self and identity as they mediate the space between themselves and the dolls. Their full visibility onstage heightens their role in controlling the processes of representation. A Freudian reading would interpret the repeated reenactment of the burial and disinterment of the bodies as a representation of unresolved trauma. The lack of dialogue and the dolls’ rigid, expressionless faces contrast with the erratic movements of their limbs, set in motion by the manipulators. Freud writes that a patient who has experienced trauma often reproduces it “not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”95 But what does it mean when the symptoms of trauma—reenactment and repetition—are consciously framed by theatre? This question is particularly relevant for object theatre, when the puppeteers’ manipulation of the dolls separates agency from enactment, displacing symptoms and raising awareness of the missing or misplaced origin of trauma. Contrary to Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa, envisioned as a homage to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, in which Antígona performs the rites of burial for her brother, in El hombre these repeated burials are not meant to facilitate mourning or commemoration.96 Instead, emphasis is placed on reconnecting historical evidence with the manifestation of its symptoms, especially urgent in the climate of impunity of the Menemist nineties.97 Perhaps not surprisingly, Periférico’s incursion into object theatre coincides with the election and era of Menem, his highly theatrical government, ceremonial embodiment of politics, and his executive decrees of impunity. In El hombre de arena, el Periférico keenly enacts the separation of agents and bodies in a ritualized burial that recalls Menem’s manipulation of Rosas in the repatriation ceremony. The general amnesty laws blocked testimonial and legal evidence, and produced a crisis in language, which is reflected in the muteness of the dolls and lack of dialogue in El hombre. Onstage bodies presented as vehicles for polemical history (La malasangre, Una pasión) or as hollowed-out, ahistorical recipients (El hombre) generate a similar desire in spectators to historicize Argentina’s past and to attribute meaning to individual and collective past experience. The

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irreducibility of the onstage body and the ease with which it is appropriated discursively to stand for something else shed light on why Argentina’s most polemical, famous bodies (Rosas, Evita and Juan Perón, etc.) have a history of being manipulated to achieve diverse political aims on national and theatrical stages. Bodies—both those saturated with and void of history—coexist on Argentina’s stages and reflect distinctive aesthetics but a shared interest in how past experience is transmitted and how bodies intersect with Argentina’s past.

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Chapter

5

Argentina’s Middle Class: Paradigm of ∗ Crisis and Renewal For over a century Argentine playwrights have employed theatrical strategies and thematic innovations to represent the crisis of the middle class and to examine the relationship between national identity, belonging, and consumerism. The redrawing of urban space during the presidency of Carlos Saúl Menem (1989–1999) corresponded to a redefining of the contours of the body politic in cultural production, which in theatre produced a wide range of onstage bodily metamorphoses. A number of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century plays by Roberto Cossa, Federico León, Cristina Escofet, and Los Macocos exemplify the ways discourses of global capitalism became embodied in cultural representation of the nineties in Argentina.1 Focusing on middle-class families that languished (El Saludador, Los Albornoz, Mil quinientos) and flourished (Eternity Class) economically during the Menemist nineties, these playwrights employ tragicomic irony in their portrayals of characters whose bodily transformations (dismemberment, organ donation, plasticization, transfusion) enact the commodification of identity, while darkly alluding to the absorption of national identity into the global market and the privatization of the middle class. The ultimate disintegration of bodies in these plays sends a clear message denouncing the effects of Menem’s neoliberal policies on the social body. This chapter examines the techniques and strategies these playwrights (and others) use to construct this message, but moves beyond a discussion of denunciation to pose broader questions

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concerning the discursive and material relationships between bodies, space, class, and global capitalism as they are imagined through theatre and performance. The origins of Argentina’s middle class can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century, when millions of predominantly southern European immigrants arrived to the ports of Buenos Aires, transforming the country’s demographics and creating the conditions for the development of a broad middle sector.2 Theatre accommodated the demands of this steadily growing group, and from the early 1900s to 1930, national theatre companies gradually began to outnumber and replace European ones, new theatre houses were constructed, and theatrical spectatorship in Argentina rose from 1.5 million in 1900 to 7.3 million in 1923.3 This “spectacular” growth coincided with the consolidation of Argentina’s middle class in the first several decades of the twentieth century.4 As a signifier for collective identity, an imagined community, and source of national belonging, Argentina’s middle class has continued to serve as a barometer for the social, political, and economic well-being of the nation. Of the early-twentieth-century popular theatre genres, the sainete criollo, in particular, sought to represent the newly arrived immigrants and provide them with a sense of collective belonging and shared experience that would ultimately outweigh cultural and linguistic differences among them and facilitate their national integration. During this period, and in addition to theatre, new spectators were able to partake of novel cultural offerings ranging from film, tango, the circus, theatre weeklies, and literature.5 In her study of the popular sainete criollo genre, the theatre scholar Silvia Pellarolo remarks that in light of the repressive Saenz Peña Law (1912)—whose call for “universal” suffrage nonetheless prohibited women and foreigners from voting— cultural consumption offered these marginalized audience members a form of empowerment, if not as voters, then at least as consumers.6 In this way, cultural consumption in the form of theatrical spectatorship created an alternative form of identity consolidation for these members, who eventually contributed to Argentina’s expanding middle class. The early-twentieth-century sainetes are commonly set in the patio of the conventillos, the makeshift multifamily dwellings found on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the marginalized port neighborhoods of La Boca or Caminito, where immigrants first arrived and

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temporarily made their homes. The conventillo—an urban, marginalized space—nonetheless provided the standard theatrical backdrop for the interaction of the criollos and the immigrants and their tense negotiation for status and self-worth within the changing urban imaginary of Buenos Aires. As Pellarolo indicates, the dramatization of this marginalized, public space played an important role in forging the emerging identities of the communities grouped in the conventillos and their assimilation into the greater urban sphere (48). The grotesco criollo, successor genre to the sainete criollo, exacerbates the psychological dimension of individual disillusionment and isolation and provokes a shift from dramatization of the open, public space of the conventillo to the private, enclosed space of the family home.7 Both Claudia Kaiser-Lenoir and David Viñas view the grotesco criollo as the culmination of the failed project to “hacer l’América” [make it in America]. In a sense, the sainete and the grotesco criollo represent separate stages in the immigration project: the sainete criollo documents the building of community and fosters integration of immigrants, while the grotesco criollo offers a disillusioned, psychological assessment of the project’s outcome.8 From the Conventillo to the “Country”: The Privatization of Argentina’s Middle Class

To the sociologist Maristella Svampa, a myth of homogeneity surrounds Argentina’s middle class, even though it is actually quite amorphous, structurally weak, and socially and professionally heterogeneous.9 Despite, or perhaps because of the elusiveness of the category “middle class,” a majority of Argentines historically have identified with it. In fact, as Svampa further notes, in the 1980s, polls showed that 70 percent of Argentines characterized themselves as middle class (41). Specific factors and circumstances converged during the late nineties and early twenty-first century to unsettle the longstanding foundations of this category. Many of the economic policies associated with Menem’s presidency (1989–1999) had their beginnings during the military dictatorship under Economy Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, who is responsible for implementing the regime’s neoliberal economic policy and ushering in what Idelber Avelar deems “the epochal transition from State to Market”—the consequences of which would culminate in Argentina’s systemic collapse

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of 2001.10 Menem’s policies favored widespread privatization, deregulation of industry, and reduction of the role of the state. With the aid of Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, the president was able to halt inflation and stabilize the economy, but as a result unemployment skyrocketed and there appeared the first signs of the unprecedented poverty, inequality, and marginalization that are now considered a part of Menem’s legacy (39). During his presidency Menem cultivated a first world discourse and encouraged identification with the United States. As Svampa observes, those who benefitted from this model became assimilated into the new group of “winners,” while those who were affected negatively became filtered into a new group of “losers,” also called the “nuevos pobres” [new poor].11 Svampa analyzes the reorganization of urban space under Menem to accommodate these new groups of “winners” and “losers.” The nineties produced an exodus of middle- and upper-class families to the private residence communities that sprouted up in the outlying areas of Buenos Aires during the nineties, commonly referred to as “countries.” Svampa cites that in 2000 there were 13,500 families living in private communities outside Buenos Aires—compared with 1,450 in 1994 (57). The author further notes that extracting a considerable portion of the middle class from the urban center and transplanting it to a gated periphery had the ironic effect of creating a truly homogeneous middle class for the first time on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (69). Spatial segregation and the resulting homogeneity of the “countries” were evidence, according to Svampa, of the ways in which privatization was affecting not only the relationship between the middle class and consumerism but also traditional models of socialization and lifestyles (46). The grouping together of individuals who often share age range, culture, religion, race, and salary led to an intensification of the division between categories of “us” and “them” and “inside” and “outside” and increased social marginalization (69). Comparing the early and late twentieth century indicates that in both contexts, the reorganization of urban space (the conventillo versus the country) corresponds to moments of transformation of Argentina’s middle class. El Saludador (1999)

Roberto Cossa’s El Saludador explodes the parameters of the middleclass imaginary by introducing a main character with a global itinerary

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who is, according to one performance review, stuck “entre el proyecto utópico de los 70 y la realidad globalizada de los 90” [between a utopian project of the seventies and the globalized reality of the nineties].12 Cossa has consistently written about and for Argentina’s middle class and is hailed as a dramatist who engages the problems of contemporary Argentina.13 Staged at the San Martín Theatre, Cossa’s El Saludador (The Greeter, 1999) revolves around the repeated return of the main character, the Saludador, to his family and home in a humble neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Husband to Marucha and father of Vicente, the Saludador is an absent-minded idealist who travels the world, embarking upon adventures, collaborating on projects, and promoting activism for a wide range of causes. Highlights include meeting Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat and traveling through Indonesia, Cuba, Ecuador, Angola, Germany, and so on. As a result of his ingenuous enthusiasm the Saludador finds himself in some very precarious situations, which lead to cultural misunderstandings and mishaps with violent consequences that end in bodily injury and eventually amputation. Each time the Saludador returns home (four times in all), he is missing another limb. At the end of the play when he returns home for the last time, he has lost all of his arms, legs, and an eye, and he is wheeled onstage in a cart. Marucha, El Saludador’s implacable wife, has been left alone to care for their son under economic hardship and the pressures of being a single parent and is less than thrilled when the Saludador reappears after years of being away and out of touch; she reproaches her husband for not calling or sending a telegram and is quick to expel him from their home by tossing him over the wall repeatedly throughout the play. In spite of the anger and resentment she feels toward the Saludador, she still loves him and confesses that he is the only one who can arouse her physically. The play ends somewhat awkwardly when Marucha finally gives in and allows him to stay, but by this point the Saludador has lost all his limbs and an eye. The last scene exhibits the Saludador perched on the wall near their home, “de espaldas al público. Su cabeza, curiosa, gira hacia uno y otro lado. Está feliz y se le escucha decir: Buenas tardes . . . Adiós . . . Buenas tardes . . . ¿Cómo le va a usted, vecino?”14 [with his back to the audience, he turns his head from one side to the other. He is happy and he is heard saying: Good evening . . . Goodbye . . . Good evening . . . How are you, neighbor?] At the end of the play the main character is present onstage and

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reintegrated into the family unit, but audiences are left feeling a bit unsettled. As Sharon Magnarelli notes, the main character’s identity as greeter (Saludador) resonates most strongly in this ending scene, though consolidation and frustration of this identity occur simultaneously, as the Saludador has lost his arms in his travels and can no longer wave.15 The hidden act of violence behind the transformed body and the main character’s lack of acknowledgment of this violence, heightened by his façade of contentment that generates laughter, are perhaps closer to a nervous reflex than an act of catharsis.16

El Saludador Credit line: El Saludador by Roberto Cossa. Directed by Daniel Marcove. Teatro San Martín. Sala Casacuberta, 1999. Actors left to right: María Cristina Laurenz and Hugo Arana. Photographer: Carlos Furman. Courtesy of Kive Staiff and the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires.

In theatre, onstage bodies engage discursively in debates of present concern, but they are also inescapably repertoires for the past and specific historical and cultural contexts. In their study on nonverbal languages in Argentine theatre, Perla Zayas de Lima and Beatriz Trastoy trace bodily transformations in contemporary Argentine theatre to the dramaturgy of Roberto Arlt and the tradition of the grotesco criollo in the theatre of Armando Discépolo in the early twentieth century.17

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In the context of the nineties, the Saludador embodies the ills of globalization, the crisis of the middle class, and the deleterious effects of Menemism, but his dismembered body also alludes to hidden violence, recalling periods in Argentina’s history, in which the acts of bodily harm were performed out of sight from the general public. As a counterpart to the “allegorical trace” Avelar sets out to uncover in his study of postdictatorial Latin American fiction and mourning, the signs of violence embodied by the Saludador link memory discourse to performance by proposing the body as both a commodity and a site of resistance to that commodification.18 The main character in El Saludador loses parts of his body, and concurrently, parts of his memory. The Saludador remembers that he loves the traditional Argentine milanesas Marucha makes, but he does not remember any of the family episodes she relates to him. Additionally, the Saludador’s memory of his son, Vicente, is frozen in time. The first time the Saludador returns home he gives Vicente a toy appropriate for a five-year-old even though his son is at least twenty years old. The Saludador’s memory overflows with vivid anecdotes from his travels, ranging from his encounters with Fidel Castro to his run-in with the Taliban, but he is unable to remember details from his wedding night. The memories of his travels, however abundant, remain loose, global fragments that resist insertion into a cohesive framework. As the play goes on and the Saludador is gradually dismembered, he finds that he can no longer remember significant moments from his life. As the contours of his body are transformed, so too is his sense of self and place in the world. This redefinition of corporeal boundaries takes place in the negotiation between local and global frameworks presented in the play, dramatized through the expulsion of the Saludador from his home into an amorphous, global imaginary, and his return to the patio of his home, the familiar setting appropriated from the nation building sainetes in the early twentieth century.19 The Saludador’s bodily disintegration exposes anxieties between global and local ways of being or reflects, in Arjun Appadurai’s words, the “disjunctive flows” of globalization, which “produce problems that manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are anything but local.”20 In El Saludador, these local manifestations play out in the reorganization of the family, reassignment of the head of household, shifting of economic responsibility, and the accommodation of the physically debilitated father. In

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the ending scene, the Saludador is seated with his back to the audience, greeting the passersby congenially as the lights dim and darkness slowly engulfs the patio.21 The Saludador’s very placement on the wall acts as a metaphor for his liminal identity; he fully belongs neither to the family sphere nor to the many nations he travels, yet he simultaneously draws on multiple frameworks to construct his life narrative, against the destruction of his body. For readers of the dramatic text, Cossa adds one last line to the play in the stage directions: “Y ya no queda más tiempo para nada” [There is no longer time left for anything] (117). The sense that time has run out, the fading of the patio setting into darkness, and the Saludador’s placement onstage with his back turned to the audience all signal the ending of an era and the obsolescence of the patio as the spatial metaphor for the nation as it had for the early-century sainetes. Cossa’s reappropriation of this foundational space is a nod to the original sainete, but far from providing a template for national integration, the dimmed patio in El Saludador self-consciously reveals its inadequacy as signifier or at the very least problematizes notions of national belonging through the depiction of the middle-class Argentine family.22 In Thomas Csordas’s work on the anthropology of the body, the field of embodiment is “defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world.”23 The Saludador’s perceptual experience has been undermined; he is unable to reassess information and recalibrate his thinking in light of the continued failure of his unbending idealism. Furthermore, his temporal perception is faulty, the local remains frozen in time in his mind as he travels the world. The Saludador’s mode of presence and engagement in the world are equally fraught, represented theatrically through the vacillating absence and presence of his character onstage and his forced expulsion from the home. The Saludador’s character expresses the crisis of embodiment through his temporal and spatial disorientation and his rather unsuccessful negotiation of his split local/global identity. Borrowing John Keane’s terms, one can say that the Saludador dramatizes the movement between the “macro-public sphere”—an entity encompassing “millions and even billions of people enmeshed in disputes at the supranational and global levels of power”—and his Buenos Aires neighborhood, or the “micro-public sphere”—a small group composed of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who interact at a sub-nation-state level.24 The Saludador’s oscillation between

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the micro- and macro-public spheres forces attention on the intersection between familial and global communities, interrogates traditional divisions between private and public, and allows theatre the possibility to be more than a metaphor for the nation. Keane’s categories are particularly attractive for studies of spectatorship because of the multiple connotations of the word “public.” Indeed, in theatre studies audiences constitute a specialized kind of micro-public sphere, which overlaps meaningfully with local, national, and global communities. Cossa’s theatre from the seventies onward frequently registers the influence of the early-twentieth-century genres the sainete and grotesco criollo.25 Cossa’s La Nona (1977) and Los compadritos (1985) are two well-known plays that incorporate elements belonging to these genres to create modernized, critical versions (neosainetes/neogrotesco) of family dramas whose themes of failure, disillusionment, and alienation can be traced to early-twentieth-century manifestations.26 These themes are prominent in Cossa’s El Saludador, particularly in the setting of the play (the patio), the main character’s unfeasible utopian ideals and grandiose projects, and his identity crisis and disrupted sense of being. Osvaldo Pellettieri explains that most modern configurations of the sainete genre produce a sentimental, if caricaturesque, depiction of the hero and in turn inspire an empathetic response from spectators when the hero recognizes his flaw or error.27 The Saludador, however, never recognizes what might be considered his major flaws, such as missing out on his son’s childhood or abandoning his family while he pursues his idealistic but fruitless adventures. In many ways the main character of El Saludador resembles one of Cossa’s earlier characters, Miguel, from the play De pies y manos (Of Feet and Hands, 1984). Like the Saludador, Miguel is intellectually curious and well versed in leftist ideologies but suffers amnesia when it comes to his personal life and national history. Jean Graham-Jones suggests that Miguel’s major flaw is the cowardice that impedes him from putting his theory into practice and, like the Saludador, Miguel does not recognize this flaw at the end of the play, leaving Argentine audiences without a sense of resolution.28 Another notable parallel between the two plays is the character of the young man (Hernán in De pies y manos and Vicente in El Saludador) who seems very ill-equipped to inherit the complex and unresolved reality that his selectively amnesiac parents’ generation will leave him. As María de los Ángeles Sanz notes, “El futuro, parece decirnos el autor [Cossa], es ese joven desvalido,

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tragicómico, casi caricaturesco, en quien va a caer el poder de la violencia de una sociedad sorda”[The future, Cossa seems to be saying, is this disabled youth—tragicomic and almost caricaturesque—who will be forced to bear the burden of the violence of an indifferent society].29 Although Cossa does provide glimpses of the youth of the future, the playwright still centers more attention on the perspective of the parents and their inability to communicate and transmit knowledge and experience to the younger generation. Vicente is unreflective, conformist, and unable to establish his own identity under the overbearing influence of his mother. He follows her advice and secures the mediocre factory position. His final words in the play—“tengo que ir a trabajar” [I have to go to work]—seal his fate as a cog in the machine, resigned to a mundane, uninspired existence.30 The trope of the self-made man evolved in tandem with a nation that was largely shaped by a community of mostly male immigrants who voluntarily arrived at the country’s port. In Argentine drama, the crisis of the self-made man is a constant theme whose representations can be traced to turn-of-the-century realist tragedies, the early-century grotesco criollo dramas, and the realism of the sixties and onward. Classic works belonging to these respective periods and genres are Barranca abajo (Down the Gully, 1905) by Florencio Sánchez (Uruguay), Mateo and Stéfano (1923, 1928) by Armando Discépolo, and Nuestro fin de semana (Our Weekend, 1964) by Roberto Cossa.31 The main characters in these plays are heads of households who must work to support their families in fast-changing economic and social environments. They comprise a genealogy of family men in Argentine theatre whose dreams, fears, and ultimate disillusionment continue to be recycled and reframed in plays throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Discépolo’s Mateo depicts particularly well the crisis of the selfmade man in the early twentieth century. The play’s premiere in Buenos Aires coincided with and resounded the effects and challenges of integrating approximately 4 million European immigrants who entered Argentina between 1857 and 1930 and settled predominantly in Buenos Aires.32 From 1895 to 1914 almost half of the population of greater Buenos Aires was made up of foreigners (187). Although the city boasted the fastest-growing economy in the world from 1920 to 1929, the surplus of laborers meant that wages were kept low, and instead of finding the promised land, immigrants faced continued

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poverty and hunger, leading to the sentiment of disappointment and betrayal and the return of a significant number of immigrants to their homelands.33 As previously mentioned, while the sainete concentrated on representations of integration and collective identity, the later grotesco criollo provided an outlet for the individual expression of alienation and the fear of failure. Viñas writes, El grotesco, pues, se nos aparece como la encarnación literaria de un proyecto deficiente. Correlativamente, las clases medias de origen inmigrante. Y, la Argentina misma, como soporte y contexto de ese teatro, es un “país grotesco” en la mutilación de sus proyectos. (88) [The grotesque thus seems to be a literary incarnation of a deficient project, corresponding to the middle classes descended from immigrants. And, Argentina itself, as support and context for this theatre, is a “grotesque country” through the mutilation of its projects.]

The main character in Discépolo’s Mateo is Miguel, the father of three children whose employment as driver of a horse-drawn carriage is threatened by the arrival of the automobile and its mass distribution in society. Miguel is set in his ways and reluctant to give up his antiquated profession, and his loyalty to tradition and an honest work ethic prove to be unrewarded ideals in the context of modernization and a fastchanging economy. Miguel feels responsible for his family’s financial well-being but initially refuses to compromise his values in order to make more money. Finally, out of desperation, he decides to take part in a robbery, his horse-drawn carriage serving as the get-away vehicle. As he lies waiting for the burglars to return to his carriage, he ponders his decision in a moving monologue, in which he confesses his shame and angst to Mateo, his horse, and ultimately concludes that he made the only possible decision: “Y mañana . . . cómo comemo? Hay que entrare. ¡Hay que entrare! [And tomorrow . . . how will we eat? I’ve got to give in. I’ve got to give in!].34 It is for the sake of his family that Miguel compromises his ethics, depicted in this play as a necessary step in social assimilation and economic viability. Instead of economic gain, Miguel’s decision to take part in the crime leads to a grotesque climax. In the get-away Miguel realizes that the carriage is too weighed down by loot but desperately attempts to drive Mateo through a patch of thick mud in order to escape. The horse collapses from exertion and the carriage falls on top of the animal, plastering him in the mud.

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Miguel abandons the scene and makes it back to his home, but as a broken man. In one of the last scenes, his son Carlos arrives wearing his new uniform as taxi driver, thereby producing extreme disappointment in Miguel. Carlos confesses to his father that he knows he would have preferred it if he had chosen another profession, and Miguel responds, “Pero . . . hay que entrare. He comprendido. No me haga caso, hijo. Estoy contento de que usté pueda ya mantener a la familia. Yo no podía más. Estoy cansado. Como Mateo . . . Ya no sirvo, soy una bolsa de leña” [But . . . one has to give in. I understand. Don’t listen to me, son. I am pleased you can help support the family. I myself couldn’t. I am tired. Like Mateo . . . I’m not worth anything anymore, just a useless heap] (342). Miguel portrays himself as impotent and dehumanized through his identification with Mateo. Yet in spite of his recognition of inadequacy and failure, he is not necessarily able to grasp the larger picture and contextualize his failure socially. According to Kaiser-Lenoir in her comparison of Miguel and Stéfano (two main characters from different works by Discépolo), A diferencia de Miguel, quien nunca alcanza completamente una toma de conciencia de su condición en el mundo, para Stéfano la revelación tiene implicaciones más complejas. Cuando el personaje es finalmente forzado a enfrentarse con la realidad, de este enfrentamiento resulta una absoluta e irrevocable desmitificación en la visión que hasta ahora ha tenido del mundo y de sí mismo.35 [Contrary to Miguel, who never is completely made aware of his condition in the world, for Stéfano this realization has more complex implications. When the character is finally forced to confront reality, this confrontation results in the absolute and irrevocable demythification of the vision he had had of the world and of himself.]

In Discépolo’s Stéfano (1928) the main character, Stéfano, has lured his Italian parents to Argentina on the basis of his promise as an aspiring orchestra composer. He is never able to create his opera prima, and his family reproaches him constantly throughout the play as they try to come to terms with their new identities as poor, disenfranchised immigrants. Stéfano recognizes and contemplates his failure more thoroughly than Miguel, and he identifies philosophical and psychological dimensions to his struggle when in the epilogue he comments, “Todo se encamina a un fin venturoso, ¿no? Todo está calculado

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en el universo mundo para que usté cante su canto, ¿no? Lo he comprendido. Lo que no comprendo es qué voy a hacer con todo este dolor que ahora me sobra” [Everything leads to a fortunate ending, no? Everything is calculated in the universe so one can sing his song. I understand. What I don’t understand is what I am going to do with this pain that overwhelms me].36 In Stéfano the mirroring that occurs between father and son is more developed and, as in Mateo, the generational gap between them seems insurmountable. Esteban tells his father, “Padre, usted no alcanza bien qué penas oculto, qué amores alimento, . . . qué aspiraciones me afanan, qué porvenir construyo. Usted no me conoce, no sabe quién soy; no puede comprenderme” [Father, you can’t comprehend the suffering I hide, the loves I nourish, . . . the aspirations that are stolen from me, the future I build. You don’t know me, you don’t know who I am; you can’t comprehend me] (141). The lack of recognition between father and son neither inhibits Esteban’s identification with his father nor does it prevent him from feeling that he will follow in his father’s footsteps. In spite of the generational rupture between father and son, Esteban views his existence as a continuation of his father’s: “Siento su vida como en carne propia. Soy su continuación. Usted es mi experiencia, yo su futuro, ya que por ser su hijo sumo dos edades, la suya y la mía” [I incarnate your life as if it were my own. I am your continuation. You are my experience, I your future, since I am your son, I am the sum of two lives, yours and mine] (140). In Mateo, likewise, Miguel and Carlos’s distinct ideologies and values do not entirely erase the stigma of repetition. Carlos is, after all, a driver; his profession is a modernized version of his father’s. The themes of ethical compromise, dehumanization, generational rupture, and repetition in Mateo and Stéfano find continuity in Cossa’s El Saludador. Cossa’s play has a decidedly more comical tone than Mateo and Stéfano, although the humor is compromised by his bodily injury and generally weak grasp on reality. The Saludador is even more resolute than Miguel in his uncompromising character and rigid adherence to his ideals, and he lacks Miguel’s complexity, given that he never waivers in his moral conviction. The Saludador is yet further removed from Stéfano, who is able to contextualize his inadequacies and contemplate his incompatible position in the world. The Saludador’s total lack of recognition means that the interpretation of his dehumanized portrayal is left largely to

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the audience. Miguel compares himself to his tired, ill-fated horse, but the Saludador, though limbless, seems content to nod his head happily to passersby from his perch on the wall. As in Mateo and Stéfano, there exists a chasm in experience and understanding between father and son. In Cossa’s plays, the relationship between self-worth and one’s profession figures most prominently in Nuestro fin de semana (1964).37 As in El Saludador, the action in this play takes place in an indoor patio, this time in Raúl and Beatriz’s home, located on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in San Isidro. Raúl is an affable, personable type who lives for entertaining and the weekend gatherings he and Beatriz regularly hold. The play’s characters are all reunited under the same roof in a social gathering, but they seem to share little except for a deep, impenetrable sadness and inability to connect with one another. Audiences learn that Raúl is frustrated at work and is anxious to embark upon a new business venture, but this falls through when the friend Fernando, who was going to be his new partner in the venture, takes the promotion that should have been awarded to Raúl, on the basis of his seniority in the company. This betrayal marks the definite shift in the play from solidarity to individualism. After Fernando breaks the news, Raúl is left alone onstage: Raúl queda un instante de espaldas al público, prolongando el gesto de despedida. En el transcurso del diálogo con Fernando ha ido oscureciendo poco a poco y ahora la escena está casi en penumbra y así se mantendrá hasta el final del acto. Raúl, se vuelve y camina vacilante hacia la mesita del patio. Está abatido.38 [Raúl remains with his back facing the audience for a moment in a prolonged farewell gesture. In the course of the dialogue with Fernando, dusk has begun to settle and the stage is almost dark, this is the way it will stay until the end of the act. Raúl turns around and walks hesitantly toward the small patio table. He is broken.]

Later when Beatriz asks Raúl what is wrong he snaps back at her, “¡Nada, Beatriz! (la mira.) Está todo bien” [Nothing, Beatriz! (he looks at her) Everything is fine] (75). At this point the total communication breakdown is apparent, and it would appear that Raúl has become a resigned, embittered man. However, Cossa’s characters are reluctant to admit utter and complete defeat. It is their enduring, incomprehensible idealism in the face of humiliation and adversity that makes them

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even more tragic to audiences. In the end of Nuestro fin de semana, Raúl has regained his composure and tells Beatriz that he is considering his friend Daniel as a replacement for Fernando as his business partner. The closing scene is particularly bittersweet, because just as Raúl has regained his optimism, his wife, Beatriz, perhaps unintentionally, makes it apparent that she does not believe in him: RAÚL: Sí . . . lo voy a hacer . . . ¡lo voy a hacer! (Raúl se vuelve y mira a su mujer. Esta sostiene la vista un instante y luego sin decir nada sale al interior. Raúl, la mira salir y comprende. Su rostro se ensombrece. Las luces se apagan rápidamente). (78) [RAÚL: Yes . . . I am going to do it . . . I am going to do it! (Raúl turns around and looks at his wife. She returns his gaze for moment and then goes inside without saying a word. Raúl watches her leave and understands. His face clouds over. The lights go out quickly).]

Cossa’s main character is thus forced to recognize his own failure in his wife’s averted gaze. In El Saludador, Marucha is an updated version of Beatriz, though more pragmatic and assertive of her needs. Although more astute in her dealings with the Saludador, Marucha nevertheless can do little to extinguish his idealism. Anomalous to Cossa’s plays, Nuestro fin de semana reflects the crisis in the middle class through the eyes of one generation, portrayed through Raúl, Beatriz, and their guests. This differs from several of Cossa’s later plays in which members of the younger generation are poised to inherit the burden of their parents’ crisis, although they are usually depicted as weak, naïve, and ill-prepared to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. In the canon of Argentine plays that address the plight of the self-made man and the ailing middle class, Cossa’s El Saludador is innovative for several reasons. Though the father figures prominently, the Saludador is noticeably absent from the stage in at least half of the play. When absent, his wife, Marucha, takes center stage and delivers long monologues in which she describes the difficulties of being a single mother and justifies her decision to oust the Saludador from their home and her attempts to reclaim the deed on the house and take control regarding Vicente’s future. The Saludador’s vacillations between positions of power and impotence, and insertion into and extraction from the home, disclose a destabilization of traditional family roles, social relationships, and the identity and place of the middle class in

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Argentina. Although the Saludador remains the owner of the house to the end, he is rendered impotent and is reduced to decorative status, and Marucha and Vicente are seen as the real pillars of the family, or the cooperativo, in Marucha’s words. The Saludador represents a fusion of many of the traits and features of the antiheroes and self-made men who have been the lead characters in Argentina’s theatre tradition over the last century, but the portrayal of his fall is more cataclysmic in the almost total fragmentation of his body. Although his ideas remain intact, this steadfastness, instead of providing stability and security, is revealed to be useless in the face of the economic and social crisis that befalls the family. In the context of Menemism, the Saludador’s family represents those members of the middle class who do not benefit from Menem’s economic policy and find themselves newly poor for the first time. What on one level might appear to be a comical revision of the sainete is on another a profound exploration of the alienation that this newfound categorization as “new poor” entails for some middle-class Argentine families. Eternity Class (2000)39

In contrast to El Saludador, the playwright Cristina Escofet offers a parody of the “winners,” or those members of Argentina’s middle class whose wealth and status increased under Menem in her dark comedy Eternity Class (2000). Escofet critiques the decadent excess and superficiality associated with the Menemist nineties in her play about a family that opts to turn itself into plastic. The action revolves around the members of the Pomales family and their decision to belong to the Eternity Class—an exclusive club whose admittance guarantees immortality and physical beauty. The requirements are rigorous, however. One must undergo extensive treatment that involves converting the body into plastic and blood cells into silicone and exchanging the brain for a reduced memory chip. In addition, new members must memorize a new Eternity anthem and adhere to strict guidelines enforced by regular visits from Mr. Evans, a mysterious Eternity Class representative and body disciplinarian. In the Pomales family, Maricarmen (mother to Ayelén and Pía María and wife to Gualberto) is the most enthusiastic about the Eternity Class mission. Previously a pornography artist and cocaine addict, Maricarmen revels in her new plastic constitution. In a phone

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conversation with her husband’s business partner (and ex-pornography agent), she admits that she actually prefers plastic to flesh and blood: “¿Sabés lo bien que una se siente siendo perfecta sin tener que soportar la mierda de ser de carne y hueso?” [Do you know how great it feels to be perfect, without having to deal with this crap of being made of flesh and bone?].40 Meanwhile, her husband, Gualberto, has a harder time conforming to the strict guidelines. He asks his assistant, Lina, if he will really be able to forget the scent of her skin (91). The exclusivity of the Eternity Class is based on economic wealth and ageism. Those who do not have enough money to pay for the treatment are granted status as assistants to those who are undergoing the process. If the assistants perform their duties properly, they are allowed a spot in the ecological reserve after completing their terms. If they are unable or unwilling to perform their duties, they are ostracized, banished to the streets, and forced to fend for themselves. Lina recites poetry and captivates Gualberto and the youngest daughter, Ayelén, with her realness. She reads poetry by César Vallejo and opposes the Eternity Class mission, but she recognizes her dependency on the system and constantly reminds Gualberto that she must keep her job (60). Gualberto’s mother (Mamie) is indignant because she has not been included in the contract. He explains to her that it is simply too expensive to have her converted into plastic because of all of her wrinkles and general deteriorated physical state. Gualberto tells her candidly: “Fijate que sí y me vas a dar la razón . . . Ninguno en este grupo familiar tiene arrugas profundas. Apenas un rictus de la edad . . . Es un tratamiento muy caro . . . Cotiza por centímetro de arruga” [Just think about it and you will realize I’m right . . . No one in this familial group has deep wrinkles. Barely a laugh line . . . It is a very expensive treatment . . . the charge is per centimeter of wrinkle] (82). Escofet has declared that humor is her constant ally.41 As in El Saludador, Eternity Class’s grotesque bodily transformations are meant to be funny but unnerving at the same time. In the beginning of the play, Maricarmen’s oldest daughter, Pía María, is terribly distraught because under the two-for-one plan she and her mother have received an identical body part. She asks her father, “¿No te das cuenta? ¿No te das cuenta que me hicieron el mismo culo que a ella?” [Don’t you realize? Don’t you realize they gave me and her the same ass?].42 She later adds, “Quiero que me hagan otros glúteos . . .” [I want them to make me a different gluteus] (67). Gualberto responds, “¿Y vos sabés

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lo que vale plastificar a todo el mundo en planes diferenciales?” [Do you have any idea how much it costs to plasticize everybody under different plans?] (67). As a result Pía María announces that she wants to kill herself, and she goes to look for a gun. Shortly thereafter Pía María returns and utters what she hopes to be her last words: “¿Me querés decir, para qué quiero ser Eternity si voy a tener que andar con el culo standard? . . . (Se apunta . . . se apaga la luz y se escucha una detonación)” [Can you please tell me why I’d want to be in Eternity Class if I have to walk around with this standard ass? . . . (She aims . . . the lights go out and a shot is heard)] (68). However, she quickly learns that suicide is not an option for plastic members of Eternity Class, as she is simply reprogrammed and a new battery is placed into a hole on the side of her head (69). These outlandish scenes reach their climax at the end of the play when a virus invades the Eternity Class program and causes their plastic bodies to malfunction. Pía María’s “culo standard” [standard ass] has fallen off, and she is left carrying it around the stage, asking, “¿Me quieren decir, por qué se me cayó el culo?” [Can someone tell me why my ass fell off?] (102). Maricarmen’s right eyelid is closed shut, her arms get stuck in the air, and she has to ask Lina to help her put them down. As Lina puts one arm down, the other one falls off. Maricarmen tries desperately to regain her composure in preparation for one of Mr. Evans’s scheduled monthly evaluations: MARICARMEN: A ver, póngame anteojos . . . LINA: (le coloca anteojos) Creo que está muy bien, ¿no? MARICARMEN: Por favor, métame el brazo debajo del vestido . . . (Lina mete el brazo y lo acomoda) MARICARMEN: Eso, la mano en el bolsillo . . . LINA: Creo que ni se nota. (103) [MARICARMEN: Let’s see, put my eyeglasses on . . . LINA: (putting on her eyeglasses) I think it’s okay, no? MARICARMEN: Please, just hide the arm under my dress . . . (Lina hides her arm and adjusts it) MARICARMEN: That’s it, just put the hand in the pocket . . . LINA: I don’t think anyone will notice.]

The radical bodily upheavals that characters experience in Eternity Class differ significantly from those in El Saludador. In spite of the steady stream of humor in El Saludador and the oblivious and carefree

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attitude of the father figure, one is made aware of the violence that has been exercised upon the Saludador’s body, leaving him with nothing more than a torso, his physical reduction the ultimate, overdetermined metaphor for the diminution of the self-made man victimized under the effects of Menemism. In Eternity Class, however, characters exhibit a sense of empowerment in their ability to remold their bodies out of plastic. In Eternity Class, these reengineered bodies threaten to replace class as a signifier for power in social relationships. Terence Turner refers to the “plasticity of personal identity” that has emerged in body discourses of late capitalism to explain individuals’ attempts to take control of the production of their own identities and reformulate alternative social relationships.43 Escofet is careful to emphasize the role that economics plays in the reinvention of these bodies—Gualberto can only pay for the two-for-one deal for his wife and daughter, and his mother would be too expensive—thus making it clear that members of the Pomales family must become consumers of their own bodies in order to invent their new identities. In Eternity Class, this self-commodification reflects the intersection of identity politics with consumerism during the nineties when members of the middle class became represented more centrally as consumers.44 And referring to the effects of global capitalism in Latin America, Néstor García Canclini cites the growing tendency to treat citizens as clients and consumerism as a substitute for democratic representation and collective participation in a public sphere, a sphere he likens to a market or spectacle.45 According to Svampa, the boom of consumerism reached the middle classes in Argentina in 1993, when more credit in dollars was made available to middle-class members and they were able to buy appliances and import “first world” items on a mass scale for the first time. An article in La Nación from 1999 summarizing the legacy that the nineties left on Argentina’s collective imaginary confesses the preoccupation with image and material items: “Los años 90 están a punto de irse, no sin antes haber dejado su huella en el imaginario colectivo. Las 4x4, Internet, los autos de lujo y el champagne fueron algunos de los símbolos más claros de esta década” [The nineties are almost over, but not without leaving their mark on the collective imaginary. The 4x4s, Internet, luxury cars, and champagne are several of the most visible symbols of this decade].46 In depicting the malfunction and physical disintegration of the family unit toward the end of the play, Escofet’s Eternity Class (also a name

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brand) offers a pessimistic outlook on the potential effects of branding on longstanding social institutions. In the last scene, Lina recites poetry and Gualberto’s virus-infected computer chip produces a mechanical recording of his voice once again asking, “Será fácil olvidar el olor de la piel?” [Will it be easy to forget the scent of skin?] (109). In spite of the play’s absurd climax, the very end of the play acquires a somber tone: “Se desata un gran viento. La luz, se torna de un azul intenso. Comienza a diluviar dentro de la casa. Por un extremo vemos aparecer a un ángel negro que trae un carro en el que comienza a subir los despojos” [There is a sudden gust of wind. The light takes on an intense shade of blue. Rain starts to pour inside the home. To one side we see a dark angel piling refuse into a cart] (110). The dark angel appears twice in the play: the first time Mamie announces its presence after a shadow flutters across the room and in the last scene the dark angel is seen collecting scraps and garbage to put into the cart. Vaguely reminiscent of Benjamin’s famous Angel of History47 and the growing pile of the debris of the past, the image of the angel collecting refuse in Eternity Class alludes more directly to Argentina’s socioeconomic context at the end of the nineties, when unemployment peaked and the number of cartoneros in the streets of Buenos Aires grew precipitously.48 Emerging as a phenomenon under Menem that exploded after 2001, the cartoneros are those who became marginalized and impoverished to the point that they were forced to carve out a new profession, requiring them to rifle through the garbage of others for recyclable cardboard (cartón), glass, and plastic left on city streets. In the following excerpt, Gualberto reviews the Eternity Class handbook with Lina and describes the general “evolution” of the notion of class, from Marxism through capitalism, and finally to Eternity Class: Clase . . . término obsoleto con el que el socialismo utópico y el materialismo histórico y dialéctico, designó la pertenencia a un mismo estamento socioeconómico, y con el que se trató de comprender la moderna sociedad capitalista, dividida en estratos: alto, medio y bajo . . . Actualmente: clase única e inamovible.Término que engloba al conjunto de familias elegidas para perdurar en el tiempo y el espacio, sin distinción de credos, creencias o ideologías, ya que las mismas han caducado . . . Eso, caducado . . . Punto.49 [Class . . . obsolete term derived from utopian socialism and historical and dialectical materialism to designate belonging to one socioeconomic stratum, in an attempt to understand modern capitalist society, divided into

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three strata: high, middle, and low . . . Currently: a single fixed class. Term that encompasses the group of families chosen to endure in time and space, without distinguishing between creeds, beliefs, or ideologies, since they’ve all expired anyway . . . That’s right, expired . . . period.]

Eternity Class boasts homogeneity, which, as Escofet humorously points out, is not due to the absence of difference in beliefs and values, but to the absence of beliefs and values, in general. The superficial sameness of Eternity Class mirrors the illusion of simplicity of democracy fomented by Menem. As the political scientist Atilio Borón explains, as the state’s presence diminished under Menem, so too did popular participation in politics, and the people were relegated to the role of spectators.50 Menem took authoritarian measures to ensure his control and the consolidation of power; his disregard of the constitution, the division of power, the legal system, and his radical restructuring of the Supreme Court all contributed to concentrating power in the hands of a few and creating the semblance of homogeneity and unity (57–78). In spite of the Eternity Class’s uniform culture of narcissism and insularity, there are numerous references to what is going on peripherally to the artificial class, portrayed in the role of Mamie, discriminated against because of her age, and the assistants, excluded or censored because of their economic status or opposed ideology. They are present yet excluded from Eternity Class, and their existence is a constant reminder that the exclusive homogeneity of Eternity Class relies on the ostracism of those who do not meet its strict socioeconomic, ideological, and demographic “requirements.” During the nineties, marginalized individuals were reduced to simple types51 : those on the “outside” were either rendered invisible or made conspicuously visible by the government’s presentation of them as scapegoats for the growing economic crisis in the late nineties.52 Escofet provides testimony to this social injustice in her play by directing attention to the marginalized groups, their relationship to Eternity Class, and by predicting the ultimate unfeasibility and breakdown of this society. Eternity Class also prohibits certain forms of cultural and national memory. Lina cites the example of her friend who was banished to the streets because she tried to help a family conserve an heirloom (77). In another instance Lina tells Gualberto, “Usted sabe que no sólo debe olvidar . . . También tiene que sacudirse el alma . . .” [You know

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it’s more than just forgetting . . . It must shatter your soul] (77). In the following scene a conversation between Lina and Gualberto produces a veiled allusion to Menem’s general pardons and the resulting impunity granted to the military: LINA: No se puede estar en los 2000 haciendo apología. GUALBERTO: (Silba cambalache) Qué, ¿desde cuándo lo prohibieron? LINA: Está considerado subversivo. (77) [LINA: One can’t be making apologies in the year 2000. GUALBERTO: (Whistles cambalache) What? Since when is it prohibited? LINA: It’s considered subversive.]

The play establishes tension between national and globalized paradigms of memory. For example, membership to Eternity Class guarantees universal, “intergalactic” coverage and benefits. However, Gualberto also refers to Eternity Class as a national treatment, invented by the president, that requires repression of a previous national memory. Gualberto recites, “Hay décadas que están absolutamente prohibidas recordar” [There are decades that are absolutely prohibited from remembering] (83). Recalling the sixties’ generation in Argentina summons a period of cultural effervescence, on the one hand, and severe state-orchestrated repression, on the other.53 Eternity Class dissuades intellectual reflection of any kind, especially if it could be considered revolutionary, and instead promotes a homogenization and reduction of memory (through installation of a special chip). Aspiring members must embrace political and social indifference. Luis Alberto Romero cites this indifference as a result of the application of the neoliberal model and, like Borón, is critical of Menem’s democracy, which to Romero lacks the necessary vitality to effect changes upon society, making it a democracy of little use or consequence.54 Romero maintains that in Menem’s democracy, “sólo se vislumbran o la apatía creciente o la adhesión general a dirigentes milagreros” [one only sees growing apathy or general adhesion to the miracle-making rulers] (387). Eternity Class illustrates both of these tendencies, particularly in Maricarmen’s character; on the one hand, she exhibits social and political indifference and dismissal of those excluded from Eternity Class, and on the other, she conforms zealously to the Eternity Class guidelines monitored by Mr. Evans. Like El Saludador, Eternity Class explores the relationship between memory, body, and the middle class during the nineties in Argentina.

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The echelon of Argentine society that benefited most from Menem’s socioeconomic policy is embodied by the Pomales family. Their mission of immortality turns into a farce as body parts fall off and malfunction. Viewed as a continuation of Cossa’s El Saludador, Escofet’s Eternity Class completes the replacement of the Marxist utopian ideals espoused by the Saludador with the vague, neoliberal Eternity Class agenda. In Eternity Class, the creation of a permanent class through plasticization and a global guarantee is made possible by a society in which consumerism provides the means for the expression of identity. The demise of the Pomales family proves that Eternity Class is nothing but a façade that breaks down and dissolves at the end. What remains is the experience of the dark angel and the marginalized classes whose future is uncertain at the end of the play. In both El Saludador and Eternity Class, bodies ultimately disintegrate, subjecting to easy scrutiny a world dominated by global capitalism. In the characters of the Saludador and the Pomales family, resistance remains largely elusive as their bodies provide malleable material for inscription by dominant global economic systems. The messages of resistance present in these plays come from secondary characters such as Marucha in El Saludador and the poetry-loving assistants in Eternity Class. The ambiguity surrounding the possibility of resistance is a common trait held by many plays that deal with globalization, according to Dan Rebellato, who in his book Theatre and Globalization describes a number of performances that “exist on the edge between resistance and acceptance of the new global world” (30). Though El Saludador and Eternity Class may be guilty of constructing overdetermined bodily metaphors, they nevertheless excel in providing nuanced variations of the “resistance versus acceptance” binary by introducing a cast of characters who also embrace, deny, mock, and subvert a globalizing world. Moreover, in both plays space becomes a key discourse in defining the overlapping frameworks of belonging and exclusion that inform characters’ transforming bodies and identities. Cossa’s homage to the sainete and the inclusion of the early-twentieth-century patio setting creates a constructive interface between nation, urban space, and class—a constellation that alters significantly during the Menemist nineties. Similarly, Escofet’s Eternity Class conjures the division between inside and outside spaces in the depiction of a highly exclusive and discriminatory class and those who are unable or unwilling to join. Through allusions to early-twentieth-century genres and the

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construction of spatial metaphors, both plays consciously distort time and space, drawing attention to the temporal and spatial compressions and tensions inherent to a globalized world. In her review of El Saludador, Cosentino writes that it will be up to spectators to decide if they want to engage in self-criticism or liberating catharsis at the end of the play.55 Both plays create the conditions for the first option in their treatment of bodies, space, and time, ultimately moving beyond the question of resistance and acceptance to focus instead on new modes of identity articulation in a globalized era. Class, Marginalization, and the Streets of Buenos Aires in El Puente (1949)

The playwright Carlos Gorostiza pioneers the exploration of relationships between class, marginalization, and urban space in El Puente (The Bridge), written half a century earlier during the Peronist regime, the period traditionally associated with middle-class upheaval in Argentina. In general terms, if the early and late twentieth century corresponds to the formation and a sense of dissolution of the middle class, Peronism marks a midcentury peak in which class became intensely politicized and divided by pro- and anti-Peronist sentiment. Svampa explains that the egalitarian discourse of Peronism and the galvanization of the popular masses posed major threats to middle sectors. As a result, the anti-Peronist middle class employed symbolic and social strategies to conserve its identity through exclusion of the popular masses, whose members perceived in Peronism an opportunity for upward mobility, identification, and unification with the middle class.56 Premiered in 1949 at the Teatro la Máscara in Buenos Aires, El puente is heralded as one of the only plays staged during Peronism to address the class tensions that erupted under the populist leader. Because of the political sensitivity of the play and fears of censorship, the playwright decided to hang a banner outside the theatre stating that the events depicted in the play did not reflect the current era.57 Specifically, the play is pertinent to this study because it showcases the relationship between the middle class and the exclusion of marginalized groups, a relationship that decades later became repoliticized under Menem, as shown in Escofet’s play Eternity Class, and Emilio García Wehbi’s urban intervention Proyecto Filoctetes, to be

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discussed further on. El puente dramatizes the class upheavals under Perón in the split portrayal of upper-middle-class families trying to conserve their status, on the one hand, and young men belonging to the popular classes, restless and without work, on the other. In the early-century sainetes the standard theatrical setting was the conventillo, an all-inclusive melting pot for the recently arrived and dispossessed. In El puente, the street replaces the conventillo as the main site for social transformation. Gorostiza divides the stage space between street and home to display the impenetrability of two worlds: Es una esquina de barrio: una puerta grande de madera, cerrada y negra, hace ochava. A la izquierda, en diagonal, una calle se desliza. La casa enseña uno de sus ojos—un balcón enorme, también negro y cerrado—. A la derecha, más en diagonal, otra calle se pierde, más corta y estrecha; también allí muestra la casa otro de sus ojos: un balcón grande, negro y cerrado.58 [It is a street corner in a neighborhood: there is a large wooden door, closed and black, that faces the corner. A street runs diagonally to the left. The house reveals one of its eyes—a large balcony, also black and closed—. To the right, another street disappears at a sharper angle; there also is a house with eyes: a big balcony, black and closed.]

As the stage directions indicate, the house in the background has many “eyes,” but they are all closed, reinforcing the division between home and street, inside and outside, and the idea of the middle class as spectators, albeit unwilling ones. Throughout the play the setting alternates between the interior of the home and the street corner. On the street, the young men mill around making jokes and talk about soccer, women, and milongas, but above all, they stress the lack of work and the impossibility of getting ahead. There are seven of them, and collectively they represent the identity of the popular class. They have nowhere to go, and their future seems uncertain. Passersby ignore them, and people entering and leaving the house eye them with disdain. One of the boys, Andrés, is assistant to an engineer, Luis, in the construction of a bridge, and the young men on the street are waiting for Andrés to return. As they wait, tensions mount as the events unfold. Inside the house Elena sits waiting for her husband, Luis, the engineer, as she pages through a fashion magazine and engages in banal conversation with her friend Teresa. The banter is nonetheless evocative because of the way their subtly racist and classist remarks allow

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them to form a bond of solidarity predicated on the exclusion of others. The most complex figure in the play is Elena’s father, who squandered his fortune when young and is now a defeated man who lives under Elena’s disparaging gaze. Although belonging to an older generation, he is most perceptive to the social changes happening around him. He states, “Antes las clases sociales eran dos. Aquí estaban los de arriba y aquí estaban los de abajo. Ahora no. Ahora todo está más entreverado. Ahora hay una escalera” (79) [Before, there were only two classes. There was one here above, and one below. Not anymore. Now everything is more mixed up. Now there is a ladder]. In El puente, Andrés represents the upwardly mobile popular classes under Perón, ambitious and eager to move up the ladder and comingle with the established middle class. Toward the end of the play, Andrés’s mother visits Elena to see if she has heard any news about the bridge crew and to ask her if she might lend her one hundred pesos until Andrés returns from work. A strained dialogue ensues, in which Elena caustically informs her that she will not help her because she is unaccustomed to giving out charity. At the height of this dialogue Elena’s father returns home and breaks the news that the crane on which Andrés and Luis had been working to build the bridge collapsed and buried the workers at the bottom of the river. The two women are paralyzed by shock and pain, until Elena hears sirens in the distance, goes to the balcony window, and flings open the shutters, washing the dim interior of the home in light. The ambulance arrives and delivers the body to Elena, but when she removes the sheet she discovers they have accidentally switched the bodies and brought her Andrés, her husband’s assistant. In the ending scene the young men from the street flood into the home to witness what has happened and Elena runs out onto the street yelling Luis’s name. Like a Trojan horse, the popular class invades the domestic sphere of the upper middle class in the form of a mistaken body. On a basic level, the play’s ending reminds us that bodies, in their unclothed, unadorned, inert state, are classless; their accidental exchange sends a message of equal, all-encompassing humanism. Of particular interest here is the way urban space is used as a metaphor to break down impermeable class barriers. The eyes of the house open as Elena opens the shutters, and shortly thereafter the young men from the street pour into her home and Elena dashes out into the street. The climactic ending not only narrows the gap between social classes but momentarily

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neutralizes class difference as the young men and Elena venture into each other’s territory. Through strategic use of stage space and the body, Gorostiza imagines the dismantling of rigid class barriers and exposes the hypocrisy of the middle class under Peronism. El Proyecto Filoctetes: Bodies from (the) Outer Space (2002)

Gorostiza’s strategic subversion of spatial and bodily boundaries reasserts itself in theatrical expression during and after the economic crisis of 2001. The protagonism of the body in the dramatization of marginalized groups is also central to Emilio García Wehbi’s Proyecto Filoctetes, an urban intervention staged November 15, 2002, on the streets of Buenos Aires. The project consisted in placing twenty-five lifelike latex mannequins in central, highly trafficked locations around the city in varying positions of injury, physical distress, and abandonment. Wehbi and a creative team of over sixty people situated the bodies around the city early in the morning. To each body, a group of three assistants was assigned to document and record the reactions of the passersby. In a statement, Wehbi proclaimed that the purpose of the experiment was to “interrogar en términos estéticos los posibles vínculos que se establecen en la ciudad entre el transeúnte y un cuerpo en la calle y sus posibles consecuencias sociales” [interrogate in aesthetic terms the possible relationships that can be established in the city between passerby and body, and the possible social consequences of these relationships].59 Though the experiment was carried out in the direct aftermath of the economic crisis of 2001, Wehbi remarks that he had begun conceptualizing Proyecto Filoctetes on realizing that the urban topography had changed during the nineties under Menem with the increasing presence of homeless people and extreme poor on the streets of Buenos Aires. Critics have cited Giorgio Agamben’s work in their reviews of Project Filoctetes because they find particular resonance with his interpretation of “bare life”—life that has not entered the political—and its foundational exclusion from Western politics.60 In a sense, Filoctetes seems to perform the visibilization of “bare life” in the reinsertion of marginalized bodies in the urban sphere of Buenos Aires. The name Filoctetes itself is a direct reference to the Greek god Philoctetes, a figure who was forced into exile on the Greek Island Lemnos

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because of a malodorous wound that formed on his foot. Through the placement of lifelike bodies around the city, Filoctetes represents the unrepresented, makes visible the invisible, and documents the undocumented. Most profoundly, the project disrupts urban topography and calls into question the spatial segregation between “winning” and “losing” spaces that were articulated under Menem. The responses of onlookers varied significantly from utter indifference to sympathy and solidarity, and finally, in some cases, to rage and indignation at being “tricked” into thinking that the dolls were humans in distress. Newspapers and media covered the event and reported a range of reactions. In the upper-class neighborhood Recoleta, one man punched one of the assistants upon learning that the bodies were not real, sending the assistant to the hospital.61 In the same neighborhood, employees of the upscale boutique Versace and Hotel Alvear requested the bodies be removed, without seeming to care if they were real or not. Downtown, a dog walker and his pack of dogs trampled over the inert body on the sidewalk without even registering its presence.62 In other, more uplifting scenarios, a street vendor selling mints tried to give one of the mannequins some change,63 and in another case an elderly woman brought one of the bodies a cup of coffee.64 The level of participation of the bystanders varied, too. For example, in San Telmo, after the police had been called, arrived at the scene, and found out that it was an artistic experiment, they helped the assistants put the bodies in more convincing positions.65 One of the reasons the project provoked so much controversy is that it tries to justify frightening passersby in order to force acknowledgment of the serious but overlooked problem of the homeless and poor living on Buenos Aires streets. On finding out that the body was not real, one witness shouted, “¡No pueden hacer esto! ¡pueden matar a alguien de susto!” [You can’t do this! You could scare someone to death!].66 In addition to producing unnecessary fear and worry in unsuspecting bystanders, the project created pandemonium for medical emergency response teams in the city. Although project organizers alerted hospitals and police beforehand, numerous ambulances were called and appeared at the scene of the interventions, only to find that the body in a pool of blood, for example, was actually a mannequin immersed in a pool of red paint. Although Wehbi maintains that Filoctetes is primarily an aesthetic experiment, much emphasis is placed on spectatorship and

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the documentation of social interaction with passersby. An explanation for this dual focus can be found in Wehbi’s artistic background and involvement with the object theatre Periférico de Objetos. As co-founder and collaborator, Wehbi produces macabre but often hauntingly beautiful performances. As mentioned in the discussion of El hombre de arena in chapter 4, the main tenets of the object theatre group El Periférico are to make visible what is culturally invisible and to explore the interaction between objects and human manipulators onstage.67 These tenets provide a similar motivation in the mass urban intervention Filoctetes, in which the city becomes the stage and the marginalized are made visible on that stage. Ileana Diéguez Caballero and María Silvina Persino have established similarities between Filoctetes and Augusto Boal’s invisible theatre, but they emphasize one main difference: in Boal’s theatre, what is invisible remains invisible; at no time during Boal’s urban performances are unsuspecting bystanders made aware of their identity as spectators.68 Wehbi’s project is unique in concentrating on the moment of awareness in which anonymous passersby recognize their transformation into spectators. Filoctetes not only makes marginalized bodies visible but also makes city dwellers visible as spectators, and this is perhaps where Wehbi’s intervention most resembles social activism and draws attention to an ethics of spectatorship that arises amid the temptation of voyeurism and the fear of surveillance.69 In the case of a body placed in the Tribunales neighborhood, a curious bystander who realized his reaction was being documented by the camera became incensed and told the cameraman that it was illegal to take photos of him.70 By citing the law here the bystander hoped to protect his own identity (interestingly not the one of the body in the street) and to prevent disclosure of his response as a curious—but perhaps not socially responsible—spectator. Los Albornoz (2001)

The desire to capture the experience of spectatorship on camera plays a central role in Los Albornoz (Delicias de una familia argentina) (The Albornoz’s [Delights of an Argentine Family]), a play by the theatre group Los Macocos, premiered June 14, 2001, at the Teatro Ribera in Buenos Aires.71 The Macocos maintain that they consciously created Los Albornoz to evoke the reality of 2001 and what they considered

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some of the darkest aspects of that reality, including unemployment, political corruption, consumerism, and the paranoia generated by the media and reality shows.72 As in Cossa’s El Saludador, Los Albornoz borrows from the sainete genre to address the decline of the middle class, the impotence of the head of the household, economic downfall, and bleak outlook for the young generation at the turn of the twenty-first century. The main innovation in Los Albornoz, however, is the inclusion of the television as one of the principal characters in the play. In the prologue to the work, the Macocos explain their vision of Los Alborboz: “Teníamos el viejo deseo de hacerlo a través de un sainete ‘al uso nostro’. Con nuestras palabras, nuestras muecas. Así volvió otra familia nuestra: Los Albornoz. Padre, Madre, Hijo, Hija y la Abuela. Y el integrante más inquietante: la Televisión” [We had the desire to create a sainete in our own way. With our words, our expressions. And that’s how another one of our families came to be: Los Albornoz. Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, and the Grandmother. And the most unnerving member: the Television] (219). Los Albornoz first began as Macocrisis (1996), a preliminary version of Los Albornoz, in which televisions were placed around the stage to transmit live images of the performance. According to Dubatti, the Macocos were surprised to realize that spectators became distracted by the televised images to the point that they stopped watching the performance altogether to focus exclusively on the screens.73 The spectators’ unpredicted rapture with the television inspired the Macocos to incorporate the television as a main character in Los Albornoz. By the end of the twentieth century the relationship between consumerism, spectatorship, and the middle class had changed considerably, in part because of a significant increase in household ownership of televisions. According to Wortman, the television became a key fixture during the nineties in the everyday lives of Argentines, who were spending more time in front of it than in previous decades.74 During this period, television, like education and health care, became privatized, and, as Wortman remarks, its popularity peaked as the state slid steadily into decline and decadence (92). What Los Albornoz reveals most tellingly are the consequences of this inverse relationship in which television responded to the state’s dwindling role in providing representation, support, and a sense of community. In the most irreverent and merciless vein of humor possible, Los Albornoz parodies

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the implications of this substitution of the state by television on the middle-class Argentine family. Contrary to other plays included in this chapter that fixate upon the painful process of the main character’s downfall, in Los Albornoz, the failure of the head of the household occurs swiftly and toward the beginning, an innovation that turns all attention to the wife, grandmother, and children and to how they respond to Pedro Albornoz’s absence in the remainder of the play. An heir to the traits of other selfmade men mentioned in this chapter, Pedro is earnest and idealistic and tries in vain to maintain the well-being of his family in an increasingly desperate socioeconomic situation. When his boss dies tragically and absurdly (he chokes while trying to fit an entire hard-boiled egg into his mouth to impress his friends), Pedro is certain that he will be offered his boss’s job and double his salary. Predictably, the opposite happens and Pedro receives a telegram stating that his contract has not been renewed because of budget cuts. The impact is so shocking to Pedro that on hearing the news he suffers convulsions, loses consciousness, and must be connected to a respirator, to which he remains attached for almost the entire play. The Albornoz children, Carlitos

Los Albornoz Credit line: Los Albornoz (Delicias de una familia argentina) by Los Macocos. Directed by Javier Rama. Complejo Teatral, Teatro de la Ribera, 2001. Actors left to right: Daniel Casablanca, Martín Salazar, Gabriel Wolf, and Marcelo Xicarts. Photographer: Carlos Flynn. Courtesy of Kive Staiff and the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires.

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and Noemí, are coerced into taking extreme measures to try to keep the family afloat. Carlitos is averse to hard labor but is intent on helping his “Papá Campeón” [champion dad] and decides to donate blood in order to make money to help support the family. He is eventually forced to sell his organs until there is nothing left of him except a brain and eyes, kept in a glass jar onstage, his character’s voice resounding from offstage. Meanwhile, Noemí is forced into prostitution by her grandmother in order to pay the utility bills. Argentine audiences and critics easily identify allusions to the grandmother from Cossa’s La nona (1977) in the even more ruthless and calculating grandmother character, Momma Dora, in Los Albornoz. Unlike the grandparents represented in the early-century grotesco criollo plays, who are often overwhelmed by nostalgia for their homeland and have secondary roles, Mamma Dora is the cunning and manipulative agent behind the family’s corruption; her character’s reality is most shaped by television, and she insists on keeping cable at any cost and even convinces her daughter, Graciela, to disconnect her son-in-law’s respirator in order to continue paying for cable. In typical Macocal fashion, Mamma Dora makes the following case to her daughter: Está bien, si querés usar esta plata para extenderle artificialmente la vida a ese despojo que alguna vez fue tu marido, usala. Pero te advierto que estás apostando a la muerte con el dinero que es vital para tu familia . . . este dinero que es fundamentalmente el integrante anónimo de esta familia, la novia ausente, compañero en la salud y en la enfermedad, la alegría de los domingos a la tarde, ¡estoy hablando de nuestro fiel y querido cable!75 [OK, OK, if you want to use the money to artificially extend the life of that useless piece that was once your husband, go ahead. But I warn you that you are placing your bets on death with money that is vital to your family . . . basically, this money is like a member of the family, at once the absent girlfriend, companion in sickness and in health, the joy of Sunday afternoons, I am talking about our faithful and loving cable!]

Mamma Dora is an avid spectator of the twenty-four-hour-a-day reality show broadcast by Ernesto Network. Ernesto performs a variety of functions: he delivers the weather forecast, announces the news, serves as a gameshow host, and carries out his daily tasks for an audience that watches attentively, at all times. Mamma Dora confuses the televised world with her own reality and privileges the televised one if a

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conflict between the two arises. Before taking a nap Ernesto looks into the camera lens and tells his public: Están ahí, yo estoy acá, como siempre. Ernesto, Ernesto común, como vos, como todos, con la diferencia que yo salgo por la televisión, claro. Los acompaño las 24 horas compartimos toda mi vida. Ustedes ven todo lo que hago. Yo no les puedo mentir. Yo soy la verdad y la vida. Mi vida, tu vida, la vida misma. Yo, Ernesto, entro en tu vida. Y ahora voy a dormir una siestita. Soñá con Ernesto . . . (230). [You are there, I am here, like always. Ernesto, ordinary Ernesto, just like you, like everyone, the difference being that I am on television, of course. I am with you 24 hours a day, we all share my life. You all see what I do. I can’t lie to you. I am truth and life. My life, your life, the same life. I, Ernesto, enter into your life. And now I am going to take a nap. Dream about me . . . ]

The fusion of the two worlds is so complete for Mamma Dora that she tells her daughter to keep it down because Ernesto is taking a nap (230). According to Wortman, until 1996 television in Argentina was complicit with the well-positioned middle and upper classes in legitimizing the fiction of prosperity, even though the country, as a whole, continued to become more and more impoverished.76 By 2000, however, total recession made a discourse of prosperity untenable, and the arrival of new trends and discourses in television accompanied this shift. Wortman writes that one of the most revealing phenomena was the introduction of journalistic programs, which surged after December 2001 (93). These charismatic television personalities arrived on the scene to play an important role in redefining national identity in a moment of crisis through discourses and modes of address that either accentuated or neutralized inequality, included or excluded viewers, and reafirmed or rejected social discourses of the nineties. In their portrayal of Ernesto, the Macocos parody the new breed of mediatic leaders that emerged as a substitute for traditional roles of leadership (e.g., state, governmental, political, intellectual) that faltered in the late nineties and early-twenty-first century. Such is Ernesto’s seductive influence that Mamma Dora willingly sacrifices the integrity of her family in order to preserve the sense of community and closeness that Ernesto Network provides her. As Beatriz Sarlo indicates, there is something about direct discourse in

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live television that makes it an extremely effective strategy for creating and representing a sense of realness.77 Sarlo explains that, especially in large cities, mediatic communities appeal to those who have become disenchanted with possibilities of establishing other kinds of communities.78 Clearly, in times of social or economic crisis, it is understandable why television might function as an escape, a coping mechanism, or therapy. The Macocos play with these psychosocial motives in the portrayal of Ernesto as the savior of Argentina’s ailing middle class. In the following excerpt Ernesto announces an interactive game he is going to play with his public: ¡Buenas tardes, familia argentina! Yo soy Ernesto, Ernesto Vivo. Transmitiendo en directo, como siempre, desde el estudio mayor de Ernesto Network. Y ahora, a la tarde, vamos a jugar el Manotazo de Ahogado: el juego que salva, rescata, que saca a flote. ¿Están desahuciados?, ¿están abandonados? ¡Dios se olvidó de ustedes, pero Ernesto no! Qué lindo que haya tanta gente que vino a jugar conmigo. (Al público). A ver hagan conmigo desde aquí y desde sus casas también. Levanten el brazo izquierdo, la otra mano a la nariz y dicen ‘Me estoy hundiendo.’79 [Good evening Argentine family! I am Ernesto, Ernesto live. Broadcast directly, as always, from the main studio of Ernesto Network. And now, in the afternoon, we are going to play The Last Flailings of a Drowning Man: the game that saves, rescues, and brings back to life. Are you hopeless? Abandoned? God forgot about you, but not Ernesto! How lovely to have so many people playing along tonight. (To the audience). OK, everyone do as I do in your homes. Raise your left arm, your right hand to your nose, and say “I am sinking.”]

The Albornoz family plays the game and is about to give the winning answer to a question over the phone to Ernesto to collect 1 million pesos when suddenly their line is disconnected because they had not paid the phone bill. Ernesto responds, “Qué pena, otra familia que se hundió” [Too bad, another family sank] (245). Every single aspect of the lives of the Albornoz family is determined by their ability to participate and belong as consumers. Unable to pay the phone bill, the family misses their opportunity to keep afloat and they sink a little further. Mil quinientos metros sobre el nivel de Jack (1999)

Metaphors of familial drowning, sinking, and shipwreck are represented more literally in the play Mil quinientos metros sobre el

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nivel de Jack (Fifteen Hundred Meters above the Level of Jack) by Federico León, premiered in 1999 at the Teatro del Pueblo. In this play, a mother, her son Gastón, the son’s girlfriend Lisa, and Lisa’s son Enso converge in a less traditional family arrangement in an exploration of paternity crisis and the strategies to fill the void left by the absent fathers of both sons. Gastón’s father works on a submarine in a remote location, and the only information given on Enso’s father is that he has abandoned the family and taken the television with him. Cable television plays a similarly prominent role in Mil quinientos metros as in Los Albornoz. The only way Gastón and his mother can see their lost father/husband is by watching the scuba-diving documentaries broadcast on cable in which he stars. Throughout the play, the mother remains immersed in a bathtub onstage. Eventually all four characters get into the bathtub and water spills over onto the stage. The television screen fogs up and the mother announces that it is filled with water. All references to water suggest that the characters’ world is in the process of inundation and is under the threat of becoming completely submerged. Lola Proaño Gómez analyzes Mil quinientos metros in the context of neoliberalism and the crisis of late Menemism to identify a middleclass family on the verge of an apocalypse, motivated but ultimately undermined by consumerism.80 The crisis of the middle-class family, paternal absence, the prominence of cable television, and the family’s dependence on consumerism are notable thematic parallels between Los Albornoz and Mil quinientos metros, although stylistically the two plays are very different. Unlike Los Albornoz, which conveys family identity through satire and humorous gags, Mil quinientos metros punctuates familial interactions with pauses and breaks in communication as characters drift in and out of sleep and in and out of the bathtub. In the two plays the television is both a discursive component and central prop and focal point onstage. In his essay on the creation of the performance, Federico León writes that in one of the ending scenes, when the mother finally leaves the bathtub to go outside and look for cigarettes, she picks up the television and carries it to the side of the bathtub with Gastón, Enso, and Lisa still inside, and she pauses for a moment, at which time, León explains, audiences are unsure if she will drop the television into the bathtub and electrocute them or place it on the table.81 As in Los Albornoz, the television is presented as an instrument that hypnotizes but can potentially undermine the

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family, but at least in León’s play, the mother places the television on the table and avoids a total familial apocalypse. In Los Albornoz there are numerous televisions placed around the audience space, in addition to the main one onstage. According to Dubatti, even the stage was designed to look like a television set.82 Ernesto, the host of Ernesto Network, appears on the television screens, but his character also appears live, walking around the auditorium. A cameraman follows him everywhere to capture his interaction with the audience. The presence of these multiple lenses, screens, and perspectives makes apparent the technologies of production and reception of spectatorship and makes audience members conscious of their changing roles—at times as spectators of the play Los Albornoz, and at others as spectators of Ernesto Network, when Ernesto’s character is mingling with the audience followed by cameras. In the prologue, the Macocos make explicit their desire to create a sainete for the millennium by incorporating a television as a main character in order to establish dialogue with the discourses of globalization.83 Pellarolo reminds us that the sainete is a very metatheatrical genre that involves the audience and constantly breaks down the fourth wall.84 Introduction of the cameras, television screens, and Ernesto’s on- and offstage presence creates an interface between theatre, mass media, and performance. The combination of disparate modes of production logically affects modes of reception and the kinds of spectatorship communities that develop as a result of the incorporation of multimedia in performance. Both theatre and television produce imaginary communities through the process of reception, but unlike television, theatre requires the congregation of bodies in one place. In her account of communities of spectatorship Susan Bennett identifies important differences between television and theatre: Television, above all, lacks the sense of public event that attaches to both theatre and cinema. It denies the audience the sense of contact with the performers that is integral to any theatrical performance and, moreover, it denies the spectator-to-spectator communication (in both positive and negative aspects) within the larger framework of audiences as community85

By incorporating the television into their play, the Macocos capture the tension between communities of spectatorship as they are

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constructed privately and publicly through diverse technologies and modes of interaction in television and theatre. As in other plays analyzed in this chapter, the characters’ bodily transformations onstage reiterate the dissolution of the middle class, though Los Albornoz is unique in juxtaposing the protagonism of the body as commodity with the negation of the tangible body through its production by the mass dissemination of televised images. The stream of images of Ernesto Network that floods into the Albornoz living room remains as strong as ever despite the physical withering away of the family’s bodies. After a brief introduction, the father remains in a comatose state for most of the play and his children’s bodies transform into commodities and are forced into the market—Noemí as a prostitute and Carlos as an organ donor. Comical and disquieting, these bodily metamorphoses remind us of El Saludador and Eternity Class, plays that similarly enunciate turn-of-the-century crises through representations of disembodiment. Carlos donates almost all of his organs, so in a sense he achieves a similar level of bodily obliteration as his father and repeats the grotesco and realist pattern of following in his father’s footsteps. Aspirations for the self-made man in Carlos’s case have been limited to how he can integrate his body into the market as a commodity.86 In her study on organ trafficking and commodity fetishism, the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes writes, “The concepts of the integrity of the body and human dignity have given way to ideas of the divisible body and detachable organs as commodities.”87 And further on she notes, “Today the spare kidney represents everyman’s last economic resort, one’s ultimate collateral” (70). While the original sainetes framed immigration as the choice of ambitious men in their dream to make it in America, Cossa and the Macocos’ millennial revisions of the genre propose organ donation ironically as the contemporary equivalent for “getting ahead” in the globalized economy, literally unmaking the self-made man. Carlos’s body has been divided into parts, itemized, and sold off. Contrary to Eternity Class, in which members of the upwardly mobile middle-class family consider consumerism and commodification of their bodies as a way of constituting their identities, El Saludador and Los Albornoz expose how global consumerism threatens the identities of those who are most socially and economically vulnerable or, in Scheper-Hughes words, those who find themselves “living on the fringes of the new global disorder” (63).

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In the end, the daughter becomes a police officer and goes back to her home to arrest her mother and sister. It seems that justice has been served, in a way, although we later learn that Noemí has slept with Ernesto in order to secure the position. The entire scene is filmed and broadcast live on Ernesto Network. Mamma Dora watches her granddaughter arrive to their home on the television screen, and reality only sets in when Noemí handcuffs her. In the last scene Ernesto proclaims, “Aquí vemos la última foto familiar. Se cierra un álbum, se abre un expediente. Se ha hecho justicia” [Here we see the last family photo. An album closes and a police file opens. Justice has been done].88

Post-2001 Revisions

Gladys Lizarazu’s Agua, premiered in the San Martín Theatre in March 2005, takes place in the summer of 2001–2002 and portrays the experience of the crisis from the point of view of Argentina’s youth, between the ages of 18 and 24. They represent the generation of young adults whose framework of reality was shaped during the

Agua Credit line: Agua by Gladys Lizarazu. Directed by Gladys Lizarazu. Teatro San Martín, Sala Cunill Cabanellas, 2005. Actors left to right: Fernando Llosa and Graciela Araujo. Photographer: Carlos Flynn. Courtesy of Kive Staiff and the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires.

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nineties under Menem and shattered in 2001–2002, when the country’s currency was devalued and the middle classes’ savings were frozen indefinitely, paralyzing the country and producing collective anguish and indignation. In Agua, Lizarazu juxtaposes the younger generation to the older one and divides the stage space into two parts with adjacent apartment buildings on each side. The older pair, consisting of an aunt and her nephew in their eighties and sixties, respectively, lives in one of the apartment buildings and is able to peer through the window into the other apartment building, where the young people congregate, dance, and recover from their ecstasy-inspired nights (hence the constant references to agua). The young adults are disoriented and lost; they seek release and solidarity in the booming electronic music scene. Their parents, the protagonists of the economic crisis, are noticeably absent from the stage. By dividing the stage space into two parts, inhabited by the older and younger generations on opposite sides of the stage, Lizarazu both narrows and accentuates the distance between their experiences and versions of national memory. The missing link in this intergenerational portrayal is the parents’ generation; their absence inhibits the passing down of memory and experience from the older to the younger generation. In Lizarazu’s play, contact between the two generations remains an exchange of glances and never results in actual communication between the two groups. While the younger generation is coming to terms with its new reality in the wake of recent economic and social upheaval, the older generation’s memories are rooted in the violence of the seventies. Although details are ambiguous, there are allusions in the play to the older couple’s involvement in the militant activism of the seventies. Aurora, the aunt, still wears a necklace with a glass capsule filled with cyanide in case of illegal detention under the dictatorship. In her use of stage space Lizarazu condenses images and memories through the side-by-side stage representation of the two generations and their respective worldviews. Through focusing on these generations, whose roles were peripheral to the crisis, Lizarazu asserts the experience of those who were underrepresented yet profoundly impacted by the events of 2001. In Cossa’s El Saludador and Los Macocos’ Los Albornoz, the main representatives of the middle class are debilitated and protagonism gradually shifts to the younger generation. In the total absence of the middle generation’s representation, Lizarazu’s Agua marks the

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culmination of this shift, which is a significant departure from Argentina’s twentieth-century theatrical canon, in which the self-made man and father has consistently protagonized the crises of the middle class. Unlike several plays studied in this chapter in which bodily transformations signal crisis of the father figure, in Agua the parents’ bodies are absent from the stage. This absence could be interpreted as the final dissolution of the middle class, but a more productive interpretation of the absence of the parents’ generation emphasizes a moment of transformation of Argentina’s middle class as a young generation prepares to inherit the post-2001 social and economic realities. Despite prognostications of the end of the middle class at the turn of the century, the crisis of 2001 generated unparalleled middleclass activism in the form of protests, community gatherings, and cacerolazos.89 Wortman distinguishes these post-2001 middle-class manifestations from the activism of the sixties and seventies in Argentina, during which period activism was a way to articulate collective political projects, stating that post-2001 middle-class activism derives from individuals’ concern with the economy and their rights as consumers.90 The identification of the middle class with consumerism was well under way during the nineties, as the plays examined in this chapter show. The paradigm of the middle class has changed necessarily as globalization dislocates traditional relationships between space, time, and collective identities. Theatre—traditionally a local practice par excellence—has bodies (actors), space (stage), and time (performance duration) at its disposal to intervene meaningfully in the conflux of paradigms and global trends in the twenty-first century.

Chapter

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Intergenerational Memory and Performative Acts of Recovery Much of this book deals with the role of performance in the transmission of knowledge, experience, and point of view in the context of postdictatorial memory politics. In response to the trauma of dictatorship, theatre is able to articulate the limits of language and develop complementary strategies for transmitting individual and collective narratives of the past. What are the implications and expectations of inheriting a complex, traumatic past on both an individual and a collective level, and what are the creative approaches available to the younger generation in reconstructing the past and imagining present and future identities linked to, but not dominated by, the past? This chapter focuses specifically on the idea of the inheritance of memory, as illustrated in three specific theatrical cases: First, I analyze the relationship of inheritance between Teatro Abierto (Open Theatre, 1981–1985) and Teatroxlaidentidad (Theatre for Identity, 2001), two movements that emerge to denounce dictatorship at different historical and political junctures and whose visions of community contrast tellingly to reveal major transformations in memory politics and claims during the twenty years that separate the two movements. Second, I examine the collaboration of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo with the Teatroxlaidentidad movement to show the innovative ways theatre has been used to promote the “right to identity” campaign, geared

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toward achieving the restitution of the identities of every child stolen under dictatorship. Third, I introduce Lola Arias’s Mi vida después (My Life After, 2009), a documentary play incorporating autobiographical narratives, heirlooms, historical reference, and the unpredictable to highlight the intertwined nature of personal and public narratives and to emphasize the importance of creativity in the reconstruction of the past, present, and future. Teatro Abierto—Teatro por la Identidad

In 1981 a group of theatre practitioners and human rights advocates founded the theatrical movement Teatro Abierto, conceived of as a collective act of resistance in defiance of the dictatorship still in power.1 During the first year, organizers invited playwrights to write a one-act play based on a topic of their choice. Twenty plays were eventually staged in the first cycle, which ran from July 28 to September 21 and brought together 20 directors, 150 actors and practitioners, and over 25,000 spectators. The venue hosting Teatro Abierto, the Picadero Theatre, burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances on August 6, prompting the event’s transfer to the Tabarís Theatre, which fortuitously offered twice the seating capacity (600) as the Picadero and was more centrally located on Corrientes Avenue in the theatre district.2 Spanning from 1981 to 1985 (with a break in 1984), the annual festival gradually transformed, most notably, according to Jean Graham-Jones, reflecting an attempt to incorporate a broader range of dramatic styles, to fuse realist and avant-garde aesthetics, and to develop a self-critical voice.3 In the opening ceremony in 1981, Jorge Rivera López read a manifesto written by the playwright Carlos Somigliana, which emphasized the festival’s principal objectives: to validate the vitality of Argentine theatre, to recover theatrical audiences, to assert freedom of expression, and to bring people together in an act of renewed solidarity.4 The theatre community had reacted with outrage when in 1980 the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts eliminated Argentine theatre history from its curriculum.5 Teatro Abierto thus emerged to contest this affront and to provide evidence of Argentine theatre’s livelihood. And yet, Teatro Abierto did much more than celebrate the existence of national theatre: according to the theatre scholars Martín Rodríguez and Ana Laura Lusnich, the festival created unexpected

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consensus among theatre practitioners, audiences, and the press.6 Citing a series of interviews conducted by the journalist María Esther Gilio for the newspaper Clarín, they write that theatregoers of Teatro Abierto in 1981expressed the desire to see themselves represented in the performances, to identify with spectators, and to recover their identities (220). Other spectators interviewed described the festival as a reunion and an opportunity to share a common country, culture, and politics (221). This renewed sense of community, shared identity, and consensus were overwhelmingly yet not exlusively praised by members of the theatre community. However, the director Alberto Ure, well known as an outspoken voice of dissent, called the instant pact formed between organizers and audience members “perverse” and referred to the event as a “melodrama of the masses” (221). The phenomenon of consensus inspired by Teatro Abierto in 1981 continues to be of critical interest to scholars. Beatriz Trastoy asks, ¿Cómo evaluar los alcances y las limitaciones de Teatro Abierto a casi veinte años de su realización? ¿Cómo reescribir un evento cuya historia “oficial” fue cristalizada rápida y eficazmente por sus organizadores? ¿Qué intersticios ofrece para reflexiones posteriores—siempre necesarias, siempre esclarecedoras–un fenómeno en el que la memoria colectiva de sus artífices parece coincidir de modo tan pleno con la memoria individual de espectadores, académicos y cronistas de espectáculos? [How to evaluate the achievements and limits of Teatro Abierto almost twenty years after it took place? How to reinscribe an event whose “official” story became quickly and efficiently consolidated by its organizers? What interstices remain for subsequent reflection—always necessary, always illuminating—upon a phenomenon in which the collective memory of its planners seemed to coincide so seamlessly with the individual memory of its spectators, academics, and chroniclers of the performances?]

The arrival of a second landmark festival in 2001, Teatro por la Identidad (Teatroxlaidentidad, TxI), provides a point of departure in responding to Trastoy’s inquiries. While the dictatorship continues to be a defining referent for Teatro por la Identidad, this festival emerged in a different context with new perspectives and a renewed generation of actors, spectators, and critics. This second movement originated out of the collaboration between the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and theatre practitioners with the aim of spreading awareness of the existence of approximately 500 children who were stolen from their

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disappeared parents under dictatorship and “adopted” by families, the majority of which were complicit to some extent with the military government.7 Critics frequently describe the relationship between Teatro Abierto and Teatro por la Identidad in terms of inheritance. In her review of the opening ceremony in 2001, María de los Ángeles Sanz writes that Teatro por la Identidad represented “la continuidad estética e ideológica de aquel primer movimiento de teatristas” [the aesthetic and ideological continuity of that first movement of theatre practitioners].8 Likewise, of the 2002 festival, Grisby Ogás Puga remarks that “Teatroxlaidentidad se considera heredero del espíritu del movimiento Teatro Abierto” [Teatroxlaidentidad is considered an heir to the spirit of the Teatro Abierto movement].9 While both of these festivals participate in the recovery of community in the immediate wake and more distant aftermath of state-sponsored violence, there are notable differences in the respective premises of this recovery outlined for each festival. In the opening ceremony of Teatro Abierto in 1981, the actor Jorge Rivera López proclaimed that one of the main purposes of the festival was to recover a massive audience, “porque sentimos que todos juntos somos más que la suma de cada uno de nosotros” [because we feel that we as a whole equal more than the sum of each one of us].10 In the inaugural ceremony of Teatro por la Identidad in 2001, Valentina Bassi read a letter written by Daniel Fanego that stated “mientras la identidad de alguien no pueda ser reconstruida, es la identidad de toda la sociedad la que está en duda” [as long as the identity of even one individual cannot be reconstructed, the identity of the entire society remains in doubt].11 This exchange of consensual euphoria for consensual uncertainty over the period of time separating these two festivals reveals an intense interrogation of identity on social and political levels that has taken place over the course of the postdictatorial period. During the twenty years between the two festivals, a new generation of Argentines has come of age, and so too have arrived their questions regarding the country’s dictatorial past. As Elizabeth Jelin asserts, the transmission of the multiple meanings of the past requires the creation of an intergerational “we” and recognition that a new generation will reinterpret and reconstruct the past to give it new meaning.12 Subsequent generations do not just bear the burden of a troubled past, they also transform it and develop innovative strategies to own it uniquely. Their task is to assimilate histories while constituting separate subject positions

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and sites of enunciation; as the psychoanalyst Rene Kaës states, the urgency lies not only in transmitting the past but also in interrupting that transmission.13 Thus while Teatro Abierto celebrated survival and resistance of those who were still alive at the end of the dictatorship, twenty years later Teatro por la Identidad commemorates this movement, but also attends to the absences and the needs of a new generation of Argentina’s youth to construct their own identities and relationship to the past. This reconstruction of identity from absence borrows from the concept of postmemory, described by Marianne Hirsch as “a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.”14 Though coming of age during postdictatorship and historically removed from the events that generated the trauma experienced by their parents’ generation, many of Argentina’s youth nonetheless feel a deep personal connection to the country’s recent past, a connection Hirsch identifies as a central component to the phenomenon of postmemory (22). Dori Laub identifies the “historical gap” that separates the experience of mass trauma from its cultural expression, often spanning a generation, both connecting youth to the event and establishing distance from it at the same time.15 Highlighting the transformative agency found in collective, public responses to traumatic experience, Diana Taylor writes, “By emphasizing the public, rather than private repercussions of traumatic violence and loss, social actors turn personal pain into the engine for cultural change.”16 And, as Taylor demonstrates, in Argentina nowhere is this more visible than in the collaborative work undertaken by the Abuelas, the H.I.J.O.S.,17 and groups of young activists and artists in the enactment of escraches and other urban interventions (166). Las Abuelas and their Fight for the Right to Identity

On a Thursday in 1977 one of the mothers marching around the Plaza de Mayo asked, “Quién está buscando a su nieto, o tiene a su hija o nuera embarazada?” [Who is looking for their grandchild, or has a daughter or daughter-in-law who is pregnant?], initiating the beginnings of the Abuelas movement, originally called the Abuelas Argentinas con Nietitos Desaparecidos (Argentine Grandmothers with Disappeared Little Grandchildren).18 The Abuelas have since

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fought tirelessly for the return of their grandchildren to their legitimate families and the restitution of their heritage.19 According to the legal scholar Laura Oren, the Abuelas were successful in developing “an entirely different version of ‘the best interest of the child,’ one that was grounded in Argentine social reality and was about the children’s right to their name, to their heritage, to their identities” (186). Further she writes, “Restitution (or reintegration) was a social remedy for a social crime in the sense that it was a reclaiming of the children by the families of the victims for the values the children would otherwise have enjoyed” (186).” The Abuelas combat the effects of social violence (in the form of systematic murder, illegal misappropriation of children, and identity fraud) and its repercussions on the lives of individuals through an integrated process of social, political, and individual restitution. The Abuelas have worked closely with teams of psychologists, scientists, lawyers, and human rights experts to make sure that the restitution process goes as smoothly as possible and does indeed strive to represent the child’s best interests. As Rita Arditti explains, to the Abuelas, restitution “is not simply an act by which a child meets with her or his family. It is a complex process requiring attention at all levels: individual, familial, and social.”20 The psychoanalysts E. T. de Bianchedi and others frame restitution as a process of historicization involving rites such as observing photographs of the biological family, meeting relatives, and establishing physical resemblance and common traits among family members.21 One creative example of the attempt to restitute community for recovered children can be seen in the “Archivo Biográfico Familiar de Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo” (Family Biography Archive of Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo), initiated in July 1998 at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. The project sought to reconstruct the lives of disappeared parents through interviews with their friends and families to share with their children upon their restitution.22 The archive includes information about how the parents spent their time, who their friends were, where they went to school, what their favorite foods were, and so on. In effect, the archive provides the children a glimpse of the everyday lives of their parents and represents just one of many initiatives envisioned by the Abuelas and collaborating institutions to allow children of the disappeared to restore a sense of affiliation and community during the process of restitution.23

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The Abuelas have pioneered incredible scientific advances in order to enforce their grandchildren’s right to identity. Realizing early on that photos and memories would not be sufficient to prove that their grandchildren had been illegally appropriated, the Abuelas sought recourse from the scientific community in the hopes of enlisting advances in genetics to prove the children’s identity unequivocally without having access to the parents for blood tests.24 Consultations with the geneticist Mary King-Claire, the epidemiologist Victor Penchaszadeh, and researchers with the American Association for the Advancement of Science led to the conclusion that the identity of a child’s grandparents could be proven with 99.9 percent accuracy, and thus the term “Índice de la Abuelidad” (Index of Grandparentage) was coined (49). In May 1987 the Argentine Congress approved the law that established the creation of a National Genetic Data Bank, designed to resolve conflicts regarding the genetic affiliation of the children of the disappeared.25 Arditti writes, “The law specified that the services of the bank would be free to the relatives of the disappeared; moreover, it mandated that every court in the nation perform the studies of genetic markers on any child with doubtful affiliation” (73). The Abuelas were also instrumental in encouraging the use of forensic science in the service of human rights. In 1985 a team of forensic scientists headed by Dr. Clyde Snow arrived in Argentina to train local scientists in archeological techniques used for the exhumation of mass graves (74). The Abuelas have been extraordinarily innovative in using genetic advances to provide new forms of evidence in support of their claims and to generate awareness of the ways scientific research can promote human rights nationally and internationally. The Abuelas also appealed to the law and international treaties to further protect the rights of the children of the disappeared. They pushed to have the right to identity included in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989. According to Arditti, the Abuelas worked with the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs in drafting articles 7 and 8 (referred to as the “Argentine articles”) to preserve the child’s inalienable right to his or her “true and genuine personal, legal, and family identity.”26 Arditti identifies article 8 as being particularly important because it “fills a void by forcing the state to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity and to take action to restore that identity when it has

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been put in jeopardy” (146). Thus the Abuelas were able to influence legislation to the extent that the child acquired agency as a subject protected by the law. This idea of the child as a subject before the law marks a departure from traditional conceptions of the child as the object of the law, whose rights are best represented by a parent or adult guardian in the court.27 To further institutionalize awareness of the children’s right to identity, the Abuelas worked with the government to establish the jointly founded National Commission of the Right to Identity (La Comisión Nacional por el Derecho a la Identidad, CONADI) in 1992, thus bringing together experts in the areas of law, genetics, communication, and institutional relations.28 During the nineties the Abuelas realized that the grandchildren they had been looking for were no longer children but young adults capable of taking over the search for their own identities.29 This realization led to an explosion of creative, cultural initiatives geared toward raising awareness of the existence of these children and increasing consciousness of the “right to identity.” A sample of the names of the cultural activities organized with the Abuelas’ help attests to the overwhelming emphasis placed on the idea of identity: in addition to “Rock for Identity,” there were also events to celebrate “Music,” “Photography,” “Film,” “Dance,” “Tango,” “Architecture,” and “Sports” for identity.30 More recent incursions include “television” for identity and “radio” for identity. Conrado Geiger, host of the radio show Rock argentino and co-organizer of the popular event “Rock por la Identidad,” explained that after the unexpected success of that particular event, the Abuelas, in collaboration with artists, started to focus on music and culture as key links to those youth who would be approximately the same age as their appropriated grandchildren (129). From early on the Abuelas collaborated on projects highlighting the protagonism of Argentina’s youth and the children of the disappeared in the artistic expression of their identities. For example, on the twentieth anniversary of the military coup on March 24, 1996, the Abuelas inaugurated the exposition Laberinto (Labyrinth) at the San Martín Cultural Center, a photo-installation created by the children of the disappeared on the basis of their memories of the dictatorship, including scenes of military operatives (reenacted with toy figurines), the World Cup, school, and other experiences (112). Ana Amado observes that children of the disappeared belong to a generation that borrows from film, photography, graphic design, painting, and theatre to construct

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their identities31 : “Seleccionan, evocan, invocan en el hueco de una ausencia que define y construye para ellos el campo de lo memorable, situando su práctica como derecho y a la vez como deber, para recuperar lazos entre lo que es y lo que fue” [They select, evoke, invoke from the hollow absence that defines and constructs the realm of the memorable for them, situating their practice as a right and a duty, in order to recover the ties between that which is and that which was] (49). The psychoanalysts Diana Kordon and Lucila Edelman observe that for children of the disappeared, recovery and loss are simultaneous, integral processes in the construction of their identities.32 The agency in this construction belongs to the youth who are able to select the language, genres, and strategies to re-envision an interrupted genealogy and reinterpret their relationship to the past and present. Teatro por la Identidad

¿Vos sabés quién sos? [Do you know who you are?] is the title and main question driving Roberto Cossa’s 1997 play, commissioned as a homage to the Abuelas and a direct precursor to the Teatro por la Identidad movement inaugurated three years later. The play premiered November 22 in the National Cervantes Theatre as part of the “Semana de la Identidad” (Week of Identity). Cossa based the play on the text Identidad, Despojo y Restitución (Identity, Dispossession and Restitution), written by Ernesto Tenembaum and Matilde Herrera, and he enlisted the assistance of Leonor Manso and Villanueva Cosse to direct it. Clearly humbled by the task of creating a play that might attempt to represent the immense suffering, courage, and dedication of the Abuelas, Cossa preferred to call the performance a script, a dramatic reading, or even an oratorio.33 The final performance featured actors and actresses playing the roles of the grandmothers and the grandchildren, reciting testimonies from different cases. Three pregnant women appear at the back of the stage, and a group of grandmothers forms a chorus and marches around the stage repeating over and over the phrase “Seguiremos buscando” [We will continue to search]. The guests of honor on the evening of the premiere were the Abuelas, seated in the front row of the auditorium. In the words of one critic, “Ese espejo, de cuerpos presentes, descarga escalofríos en la concurrencia” [That mirror of present bodies sent a shiver through

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the audience].34 The end of the performance produced an emotional release: “El aplauso final es interminable, dura como diez minutos, mientras las verdaderas abuelas y los verdaderos nietos restituidos que están en la sala suben al escenario y se confunden—entre lágrimas y abrazos—con quienes acaban de interpretarlos” [The final applause is interminable, it lasts about ten minutes while the real grandmothers and the real recovered children in the auditorium climb onto the stage and intermingle, between tears and embraces, with those who had just represented them].35 Considered the inaugural play of the Teatro por la Identidad festival, Patricia Zangaro’s A propósito de la duda (With Regard to Doubt) premiered June 5, 2000, in the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center. During the height of the campaign to spread awareness of the right to identity through culture, the playwright Zangaro, the director Daniel Fanego, and the actress Valentina Bassi met with the Abuelas to see if there might be a way to use theatre to connect with young audiences. The Abuelas responded enthusiastically and provided Zangaro and Fanego with testimonies, videos, and documentaries, from which Zangaro drafted the script of A propósito de la duda. Eugenia Levin, one of the co-founders of the Teatro por la Identidad movement, confesses that she believed that the first staging of A propósito de la duda would be the one and only, but during the performance she realized that the play was resonating with the audience in powerful and unexpected ways.36 To every audience member between the approximate ages of twenty and thirty, the play posits the very real (though statistically improbable) possibility that they may be children of the disappeared.37 The doubt that spectators internalize as a result of the play’s premise goes far beyond traditional bonds of identification established between characters and audience members. The play’s ability to generate this potent identity uncertainty among young spectators inspired organizers to build on the success of Zangaro’s play to expand the Teatro por la Identidad festival to further assist the Abuelas in educating the general public and inform Argentina’s young generation of the existence of the children of the disappeared. A propósito de la duda was chosen to inaugurate the Teatro por la Identidad festival on March 26, 2001, at the Teatro Liceo in Buenos Aires. The festival brought together 300 actors, 44 directors, as well as musicians, technicians, costume designers, and producers to stage 41 plays in 14 theatres across the city. Performances began simultaneously

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at all of the theatres at 9 p.m. on Mondays during the months of April, May, and June.38 For three months before every performance a brief text written by Luis Rivera López was read before the audience, beginning with the following: Buenas noches. Mi nombre es [aquí va el nombre de quien lee], y tengo el agrado de poder decirlo. Porque conozco mi nombre. Porque sé quién soy. En este momento, a pesar del duro trabajo de nuestras queridas Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, hay todavía casi 500 chicos que no pueden decir lo mismo. 500 chicos para los que la mentira es un elemento cotidiano, fundacional de su personalidad (9). [Good evening. My name is (name of the person who is reading) and I have the pleasure to be able to say so. Because I know my name. Because I know who I am. At this moment, in spite of the hard work of our dear Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, there are still almost 500 children who cannot say the same. 500 children for whom a lie is an everyday, foundational element of their personality.]

Teatro por la Identidad creates an immediate community among audience members who are confronting the same possibility at the same time. Kerry Bystrom describes this eloquently as a “spectacle of recruitment, meant to produce both the body of the ‘ disappeared child and a national body or public committed to memory and democracy through the action of doubting and clarifying biological origins.”39 Because of the unique organization of the festival, spectators know that in theatres all around Buenos Aires audiences are identifying with performers and being identified as potential protagonists in a continually evolving story involving at least three generations of Argentines. Further along, the letter explains how the experience of theatre will help transform spectators’ knowledge and intervene actively to restore the truth: “Hoy, aquí, juntos, ayudados por el teatro, vamos a dar a luz, por un momento, una realidad en la que todos podamos creer, porque está basada en la verdad, que no siempre es hermosa, pero que es la verdad” [Today, here, together, with the help of theatre, we are going to give birth, for a moment, to a reality we can all believe in, because it is based on the truth, which is not always pretty, but it is the truth] (9). The birth metaphor encourages the idea that theatre can assist in the process of restitution of collective as well as individual identity, reassess historical narratives, and perform alternative scripts for a new generation.

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Zangaro’s play begins with a series of questions and statements revealing the all-encompassing inclusiveness of uncertainty: ¿Quién soy? ¿Quiénes somos? Porque aunque el viaje sea individual, hay un destino colectivo. Por eso la pregunta: ¿Y vos sabés quién sos?40 [Who am I? Who are we? Because even if the voyage is individual, there is a collective destination. For that reason, the question: Do you know who you are?]

Here Zangaro predicates the possibility of collective recovery upon individual restitution, a central idea echoed by the three Abuelas in the play who announce to the audience: “Mientras haya una sola persona con su identidad robada y falseada se pone en duda la identidad de todos” [While there is just one person with his/her identity stolen and falsified, everyone’s identity is placed in doubt] (157). A propósito de la duda draws on narratives of the children of the disappeared to introduce the audience to the experience of restitution and to disclaim some of the myths and misconceptions surrounding the process. The cast of characters is fairly large, including three Abuelas, a couple that illegally appropriated their child under dictatorship (Apropiador/Apropiadora), their “adopted,” balding son (el Muchacho pelado), three young men (Muchachos I, II, III) and four young women (Muchachas I, II, III, IV) who have recovered their identities, a military collaborator (Hombre), and a chorus of young people (el coro). The play opens with a little boy playing with a ball when the sound of a helicopter interrupts the scene. Startled, the boy abandons the ball and the Abuelas pick it up and begin to throw it back and forth, their attention suddenly drawn to the Apropiadora who is determinedly massaging the scalp of her “son.” The couple that has illegally adopted the Muchacho pelado argues against restitution, ironically referring to the rights of their child and the well-being of the family in their justification. The Apropiador, for example, expresses the view that people like he and his wife should be rewarded for rescuing innocent children from the influence of subversion, because, as he explains,

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the children are the ones who suffer the most: “Es la familia la que están destruyendo. Lamentablemente, los derechos humanos son de izquierda. Nosotros no somos humanos. No tenemos derechos” [The family is what they are destroying. Unfortunately human rights are for the left. We are not human. We don’t have rights] (157). The Apropiador’s discourse attempts self-victimization and reflects the argument that restitution causes an additional, double traumatization of the child. This point of view was used most notoriously by Judge Delia Pons in 1978 to explain her ruling against restitution to the Abuelas in a juvenile court in greater Buenos Aires: “Estoy convencida que sus hijos eran terroristas, y terrorista es sinónimo de asesino. A los asesinos yo no pienso devolverles los hijos porque no sería justo hacerlo. No tienen derecho a criarlos” [I am convinced that your children were terrorists, and terrorist is synonomous with murderer. I do not plan on returning children to murderers because it would not be just to do so. You do not have the right to raise them].41 And in 1994 the case of the restitution of the Reggiardo Tolosa twins was mishandled by the justice system and the media, in the end influencing public sentiment regarding restitution negatively.42 Fortunately, these cases represent exceptions, and most of those involved in restitutions, including children and experts, recognize that in the majority of cases the process is therapeutic and restorative.43 The inclusion of the Apropiador’s discourse in A propósito de la duda reflects the Abuelas’ concern that the public be informed about the process of restitution. In the aftermath of the media debacle involving the Reggiardo Tolosa twins, the Abuelas realized that there prevailed a widespread lack of public knowledge of the criminality of children’s appropriation under the dictatorship and of the social duty and ethical responsibility to recover the identities of those children.44 In the opening scene, while the Apropiadora is massaging her son’s scalp, each of the Abuelas asks separately, in repeated fashion, “La calvicie es hereditaria?” [Is baldness hereditary?].45 This scene efficiently introduces the genetic component to the Abuelas’ identity campaign. The Muchacho pelado comments off-handedly that he does not understand why he is balding while his father is abundantly hairy. His emulation of his “father” is clear in the following brief narrative of his life that he offers to the audience: “Yo me salvé. Tengo una familia, una carrera, un auto. Me siento un number one. Con las minas tengo éxito. Igual que mi viejo” [I saved myself. I have a family,

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a career, a car. I feel like a number one. I’m successful with the ladies. Just like my old man] (157). While the Muchacho pelado continues to recite the sexist, homophobic script he learned from the Apropiador, doubt creeps into his narrative in the form of perplexed pauses: “A mi viejo, el muy guacho, le sale pelo hasta las orejas. Pero de joven era pelado, igual que yo . . . (se detiene confundido).” [My old man, the lucky bastard, he has hair coming out of his ears. But when he was young he was bald, just like me . . . (he stops, confused)] (158). This emphasis on genetics might seem to undermine or overshadow the conceptualization of other kinds of identity, but the script responds to this potentially restrictive message by alluding to the significance of less empirically determined forms: CORO DE JÓVENES: ¿Y vos sabés quién sos? ABUELA I: No es sólo la voz de la sangre. ABUELA II: Es la voz del espíritu. ABUELA III: Es la voz de mi hija que me impone buscar a mis nietos. CORO DE JÓVENES: ¿Y vos sabés quién sos? [CHORUS OF YOUNG PEOPLE: And do you know who you are? ABUELA I: It is not just the voice of blood. ABUELA II: It is the voice of the spirit. ABUELA III: It is the voice of my daughter that impels me to look for my grandchildren. CHORUS OF YOUNG PEOPLE: And do you know who you are?] (160)

In this exchange between the chorus of youth and the Abuelas, the idea of identity is expanded to include more abstract and less empirical formulations. As the passage states, identity claims originate not only in genetic markers but also in the voices/memories of the disappeared that drive the Abuelas to seek justice on their children’s behalf. In the play, the muchachos and muchachas who have learned the story of their appropriation stress the importance of gesture and embodied behavior in the inheritance of “true” identity. For example, Muchacho III reveals that he has been told he crosses his arms in exactly the same way his father does and he laments the fact that photos cannot convey those gestures: “Me gustaría tanto que la foto se pusiera en movimiento. Que hablara, que se riera, que puteara, que dijera boludeces. Que se cruzara de brazos, como acuñando a un chico, así, igual que yo. Y vos . . . ¿sabés quién sos?” [I would like so much for the photo to be put into motion. For him to speak, to laugh, to bitch, to talk nonsense. To cross his arms, as if he were

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holding a baby, just like me. And you . . . Do you know who you are?] (161). Judith Filc observes that, in fact, in many cases definitions of heredity envisioned by the Madres and the Abuelas undermined biological determinism.46 This performative component of resemblance between generations reflects what Taylor has coined the “DNA of performance” or the “representational practice of linking the scientific and performatic claim.”47 By not limiting the definition of heredity to the transmission of physical traits, but rather incorporating gesture and embodied behavior in the discussion of inheritance, the production of A propósito de la duda includes itself, self-referentially, in this performative genealogy. The play also stresses the power of performance as a tool of activism through the representation of an escrache, performed after the Hombre delivers a monologue in which he admits to his collaboration with the repressive regime. The Hombre’s admission of involvement resembles several of the high-profile confessions by military officers that erupted in public discourse during the nineties.48 The hombre both confesses to his key role in carrying out the disappearances while claiming exemption from responsibility: “Yo no siento remordimientos porque no maté a nadie. Yo sólo trasladaba detenidos” [I feel no remorse because I didn’t kill anyone. I just transported the prisoners].49 A remorseless confession of this kind reflects the pathological power relations enabled by a framework of impunity. Yet toward the end of his confession he is surrounded by a group of young people onstage who initiate the escrache against him, yelling “¡Asesino! ¡Asesino!” [Murderer! Murderer!] (159). The atmosphere of the escrache returns at the end of the play, this time involving all of the performers onstage chanting “Y vos y vos y vos sabés quién sos” [And you, and you, do you know who you are?] in a full-blown murga.50 Toward the end of the play Abuela II announces, “Dentro de veinte años ninguna de nosotras va a existir, pero la lucha va a seguir para todos aquellos que tengan la duda de ser hijos de una generación desaparecida” [In twenty years none of us will exist, but the fight will continue for all of those who experience doubt and think they may be children of a disappeared generation].51 This emphasis on the transcendence of the search is of fundamental importance to the Abuelas, many of whom were already in their seventies when the Teatro por la Identidad festival began. The last character to speak is Muchacha IV, who is about the give birth: “Yo tengo la esperanza de que un

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día, ahora, o dentro de cuarenta años, mi hermano empiece a buscar” [I have the hope that one day, now, or in forty years, my brother will begin to search] (162). The National Genetic Data Bank preserves the scientific information to ensure that this is a possibility. Teatro por la Identidad provides the ongoing forum for an exploration of identity, establishing community and a sense of belonging, somewhat counterintuitively, through the bond of consensual uncertainty. As Muchacho II proclaims, “Lo que daña no es la duda, sino la mentira” [Lies are what cause damage, not doubt] (161). This enduring uncertainty has an ethical component that contributes to the perseverance and longevity of Teatro por la Identidad, long outlasting Teatro Abierto, whose force diminished once the dictatorship was no longer in power. Teatro por la Identidad (2001–2007)

Over the years Teatro por la Identidad has expanded its scope, conceptually and geographically.52 Though impossible to generalize given the overall diversity of plays presented each year, the movement shows a trend to incorporate a broader range of themes, styles, and genres to explore issues pertaining to identity and contemporary social and political concerns in twenty-first-century Argentina and abroad. Plays belonging to the 2001 cycle, such as Héctor Levy-Daniel’s El archivista (The Archivist) and Mario Cura’s Madresperanza, still heavily allude to the violence of the years of the dictatorship through visual or auditory cues. In Levy-Daniel’s piece, the main character (Ana) visits an archive in order to give a blood sample in the hope of finding her lost brother. Félix, the authoritarian employee, takes multiple samples and forgets each time, asserting power over her as a result of his convenient memory loss, while Ana hears screams in the background. Like Zangaro’s A propósito de la duda, Mario Cura’s Madresperanza introduces the visually arresting presence of pregnant women onstage in his treatment of intergenerational memory. In 2002, Teatro por la Identidad organizers offered playwrights even greater poetic license in their interpretations of identity. Cristina Merelli’s The Shoes and Norberto Lewin’s El piquete both critique the impact of the neoliberal nineties on post-2001 national identity. Taking place in a family owned shoe store, Merelli’s play addresses the obsession with branding during the nineties and the loss of traditional

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craftwork and artisanry. El piquete documents the tense confrontation that erupts between the unemployed masses (piqueteros) and a military soldier who has been sent to repress the manifestation the piqueteros are organizing. Through the use of revolutionary language and the portrayal of the historical frictions between Argentina’s working and middle class, the play reveals the specter of the military in post-2001 reconfigurations of class, employment, and activism. Other plays seek to uncover perspectives of the dictatorship that have not received sufficient attention in public discourse. For example, Cecilia Propato’s En lo de Chou (At the Chou’s) centers on a Chinese couple living in Argentina during the dictatorship. Owners of a laundromat, they stumble across evidence of illegal appropriation of a baby and are forced to grapple with issues of complicity as immigrants living in a foreign country. During the 2002 cycle, playwrights continued to expand upon the thematic content of these plays, while finding imaginative ways of treating genre and form. Erika Halvorsen’s Identikit: El Juego assumes the game show format, introducing a skit called “ruleta humana” (human roulette), in which contestants must correctly identify emblematic moments in their lives when presented with a slideshow of images from their childhoods. A number of plays demonstrate a more nuanced interpretation of subjectivity. Mariana Eva Pérez’s monologue Instrucciones para coleccionistas de mariposas (Instructions for Butterfly Collectors) presents the perspective of a twenty-five-year-old girl, a child of the disappeared who was raised by her grandmother knowing the story of her origins. She conveys her own complex emotional struggle of growing up without her brother, who, “adopted” and raised by military collaborators, does not embrace his biological family upon restitution. Mi nombre es (My Name Is), by Anabella Valencia, likewise focuses on the relationship between siblings, one aware and one unaware of her origins. In this play, and in others, such as Halvorsen’s Vic y Vic staged as part of the 2007 cycle, actors play multiple roles or (reminiscent of strategies used by Albertina Carri in the film Los Rubios) announce that they are playing each other, in a critical distancing strategy. The 2007 cycle ushered in several plays employing innovative use of humor and parody to treat subject matter traditionally conveyed in a solemn register. Citing Venezuelan soap operas as an inspiration, Norberto Lewin’s Tú no eres mi padre (You Are Not My Father)

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portrays the family life of an illegally appropriated child in a melodramatic vein, attempting to address issues of race, identity fraud, and restitution. Provocative in a different way is Guillermo Hough’s Plan reservado (Reserved Plan), a dark parody of the military establishment in the wake of the general amnesties issued by Menem. Another noteworthy play included in this cycle is Zangaro’s Última luna (Last Moon). In this work, Zangaro transposes a little girl’s search for her grandmother to the interior of the country during the Desert Conquest (the 1870s and 1880s), a military campaign led by Julio Argentino Roca against indigenous populations of Argentina. In Zangaro’s play the grandmother is a “cautiva,” by definition a woman who has been captured and held captive by an indigenous group in retaliation against the Desert Conquest. Staged in the context of Teatro por la Identidad, Última luna establishes a historical continuum linking the nineteenth-century phenomenon of captive women and its resurgence during the dictatorship and highlighting the key roles these “captives” have played in constructing the national narrative over centuries. In 2003 Teatro por la Identidad Itinerante (Traveling TxI) debuted in the attempt to reach out to audiences in greater Buenos Aires and the provinces. In 2004 Teatro por la Identidad premiered in Spain and has since had several cycles in Madrid and Barcelona, recently introducing works that deal with memory of the Spanish Civil War. In 2008 for the first time Teatro por la Identidad in Buenos Aires included works from Spain and Uruguay. This geographical expansion makes sense, because the wrongful adoption of children and acts of identity fraud occurring during Argentina’s dictatorship extended beyond national borders. Thus, the creation of uncertainty among audience members, a strategy so crucial to the uniqueness and the powerful impact of the festival, is also possible in Madrid or Barcelona. Yet, interesting questions arise regarding the specificity of context, the disand relocation of performance, and the human rights claims that drive the movement. The Teatro por la Identidad festival provides a rich case for studying the production and reception of human rights issues transnationally. Teatro por la Identidad, 2008

Zangaro’s A propósito de la duda once again inaugurated the Teatro por la Identidad festival in Buenos Aires on November 13, 2008, at

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the National Cervantes Theatre. The backdrop of the performance was a collage of photographs of the disappeared, all in black and white, except for the photograph of Julio Jorge López, which was in color. Vanishing in 2006 after testifying against the ex-police officer and repressor Miguel Etchecolatz, López is now considered the first person to be disappeared under democracy; the presence of his photograph, shiny and new compared with the others, is a powerful reminder of the continued urgency of the fight against impunity. After the performance of A propósito de la duda the Abuelas were onstage giving a speech, when the director of the theatre, Rubens Correa, took the microphone and announced to the filled auditorium that he had received an anonymous phone call from someone claiming there was a bomb in the theatre. The news created a brief moment of heightened anxiety, in which spectators looked to one another to determine how to respond collectively. Onstage, the Abuelas remained completely unfazed until one of them proclaimed, “No se crean que vamos a salir corriendo” [Don’t think we are going to leave here running].53 The resolve of the Abuelas calmed the audience and fostered consensus to stay and the evening’s performances continued without incident. This brief episode demonstrated to me (present that evening) that audience members perceive the Abuelas not only as icons of past resistance but also as leaders and activists with a vision for the future and the capability of forging solidarity even amid the threat of harm and fostering an intergenerational community of individuals conscientious of their rights and willing to fight for them. Mi vida después (2009)

Premiered in Buenos Aires in March 2009, Lola Arias’s Mi vida después (My Life After) expands the growing repertoire of plays addressing the memories of the disappeared from the perspectives of their children’s generation. Arias’s play introduces six individuals born between 1972 and 1983, who reconstruct the youth of their parents with the aid of personal items they have inherited from them, such as photos, clothes, maps, books, tapes, objects, toys, legal documents, and even a pet turtle. The performers include those affected directly and indirectly by dictatorship. For example, Mariano Speratti shares the story of his father, Horacio Rodolfo Speratti, a member of the Peronist youth movement, who was disappeared in 1976. Vanina Falco relates the process of finding out that her father, Luis Falco, illegally appropriated

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and concealed the identity of her brother, Juan Cabandié. Liza Casullo tells the story of her parents’ forced exile under dictatorship. And Blas Arrese Igor describes his father’s original vocation as priest. Unlike the plays of the Teatroxlaidentidad festival, framed by the mission of the Abuelas and dealing primarily with themes of restitution and identity of Argentina’s youth, Mi vida después is the last in a series of plays staged as part of the theatre project Biodrama, created by the director Vivi Tellas. Founded in 2001 and housed at the Sarmiento Theatre in Buenos Aires, Biodrama investigates the lives of real, living Argentines.54 Directors invited to participate in the project develop plays starting from this biographical premise. Notable works include La forma que se despliega (The Unfolding Form, 2003), a play about family tragedy and loss, by Daniel Veronese; El aire alrededor (The Surrounding Air, 2002), a work based on the life of a woman, Mónica Mabel Martínez, from the Argentine provinces, by Mariana Obersztern; and Javier Daulte’s Nunca estuviste tan adorable (You Were Never So Adorable, 2004), inspired by the director’s memories of his mother’s family. Tellas explains, “Biodrama se inscribe en lo que se podría llamar el retorno de lo real en el campo de la representación” [Biodrama inscribes itself in what could be called a return of the real in the field of representation].55 Óscar Cornago attributes the renewed interest in documentary film, theatre, and television to this quest to move beyond a fictive framework and reassert the real.56 As a response, in large part, to our technologically mediated lives, recent documentary theatre, according to Cornago, presents subjectivity as presence, the expression of human life in its most reduced form (5). This emphasis on the physical echoes Tellas’s remark that she likes to envision the project as a body incarnating its own biodrama.57 Though initially created in the framework of Biodrama, critics note that at its premiere Arias’s play seemed distanced from the project, which is curious, given that Mi vida después presents an exceptional range of playful, original techniques to rethink or “remake” past lives.58 The play opens with a cascade of used clothes falling on the empty stage in a heap, the first scene providing a tangible reference to the contours of the bodies of both the parents and the children who will play and dress up in the clothes throughout the play. The last to fall on the heap of clothing is Liza, who then stands up and walks around the stage with a pair of Lee jeans, with her hands in the pockets and telling the audience that when she was seven years old she used to try on her

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mother’s jeans. Twenty years later she finds another pair of her mother’s jeans from the seventies that is exactly her size. She says, “Me pongo el pantalón y empiezo a caminar hacia el pasado. En una avenida, me encuentro con mis padres cuando eran jóvenes. Yo joven y ellos jóvenes nos vamos a dar un paseo en moto por Buenos Aires” [I put on the jeans and start to walk into the past. On a street, I run into my parents when they were young. I am young, and they are young, and we take a motorcycle ride around Buenos Aires].59 Liza’s opening lines announce some of the key temporal and spatial juxtapositions that the play highlights between the parents’ and children’s generations. Throughout the play, characters make references to their age and the fact that they are now as old as their parents were in the seventies. They reenact/imagine scenes from their parents’ past, such as when Liza pretends to be reading the news broadcast her mother used to deliver in the seventies, or when Mariano appears as his father, dressed as a race car driver (6, 10). The play constantly creates parallels between generations without suggesting a melancholic identification with the past, an identification that Arias explicitly strives to avoid in her play, distinguishing her work from more somber plays dealing with similar themes such as Marcelo Bertuccio’s Señora, esposa, niña y joven desde lejos.60 If one insisted on finding signs of melancholy in Mi vida después, it would be in the impossible form of anticipatory melancholy, deriving from an imagined identification with the future, not the past, in which performers predict their deaths. For example, in the scene titled “El Día de mi Muerte,” Pablo announces, Yo me muero el 3 de octubre de 2030, ahorcado en un ombú como un gaucho melcanólico y sin hijos. La llanura va a estar desvastada por el monocultivo, las vacas van a nacer enfermas y los caballos con una sola pata. Solo quedarán algunos gauchos drogados bailando malambo. (24) [I die October 3, 2030, hanged from an ombú tree like a melancholy gaucho without children. The plains will be devastated by single-crop farming, the cows will be born sick and the horses with one hoof. There will only remain a few drugged gauchos dancing malambo.]

The announcements at the end of the play (originally titled Mi vida futura [My future Life]) instigate a shift from postmemory to prememory, emancipating characters from the notion of the past as dominant referent in their lives.61 Arias’s performers position

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themselves in relation to the past, present, and future by focusing less attention on the idea of aftermath and more on the idea of a continuum of experience, shaped by both the reinterpretation of past events and the speculation of events to come. Allusions to historical events abound in Arias’s play, though they are always linked to the performers’ biographies and portrayed through a highly subjective lens. For example, in the beginning of the play, in the first chapter, titled “El día en que nací” (The Day I Was Born), performers twin their births with landmark news items occurring at the same time. Vanina announces, “Muere Perón y nazco yo, después de un parto de 14 horas” [Perón dies and I am born after a fourteen-hour labor]. Later, in the section “Fast Forward/Autobiografías,” Mariano tells audiences, “2009. Crisis económica mundial. A mi segundo hijo le sale su primer diente” [2009. Global Economic Crisis. My second son gets his first tooth] (24). Silka Freire, in discussing documentary theatre, identifies this constant appeal to historical referents and a common “extratext” as a strategy for engaging spectators in the creation of a “pseudo-fictional discursive universe.”62 The playbill likewise comments upon the transformative power of this kind of pseudo-fictional universe: “Mi vida después transita en los bordes entre lo real y la ficción, el encuentro entre dos generaciones, la remake como forma de revivir el pasado y modificar el futuro, el cruce entre la historia del país y la historia privada” [Mi vida después travels in between the real and the fictive, the encounter between two generations, the remake as a way of reviving the past and modifying the future, the intersection between national and private history].63 Arias, a poet, writer, songwriter, and playwright, is very adept at developing her characters’ stories and multiple points of view through language, but, as Pamela Brownell observes, some of the most imaginative trademarks of her dramaturgy, instead, relate to largely nonverbal strategies such as the incorporation of multimedia, music, choreography, and objects onstage.64 In Mi vida después, verbal and nonverbal techniques combine to articulate a vast range of performative registers and perspectives. Brownell identifies four levels of performance in the play, corresponding to (1) autobiographical testimony, (2) a “remake” or reconstruction of the parents’ youth, (3) role-playing of the other performers and their parents, and finally, (4) action, or moments of “pure performance” (5). These moments of “pure performance” introduce chance and the uncontrollable in an unthreatening way. In

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Mi vida después, for example, in the scene “La tortuga de mi padre” (My Father’s Turtle), Blas tells Carla that his mother believes turtles can predict the future. Blas draws “Yes” and “No” on the floor, and they ask the turtle if in the future there is going to be a revolution in Argentina.65 Of course, they cannot predict which way the turtle will go, but the turtle’s “response” affects the narrative of each individual performance. Another way Arias introduces the element of chance is by involving a young child in the performance. Mariano’s son Moreno, aged four, has a key role in several scenes; for example, in a moving moment, when Mariano and he listen to recordings of his father’s/grandfather’s voice together onstage, and when Moreno sprays the performers with water guns at the end of the play when they are announcing their imagined deaths (18, 24). Arias is known for including children in her work. Her play Airport Kids (2008), created in collaboration with Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll, explores the world of eight- to fourteen-year-old “global nomads” whose peripatetic lives have shaped their definition of home.66 In Striptease (2007), a play forming a trilogy with Sueño con revolver (Revolver Dream) and El amor es un francotirador (Love Is a Sniper), there is a baby present onstage during the entire performance, crawling around, playing with her toys, and making baby sounds. In discussing Striptease, Arias reflects upon the baby’s presence on audiences: “Yo me fui dando cuenta de eso en el proceso de trabajo, el temor no es por el bebé, sino por aquello que no se puede controlar, tal como es el mecanismo de esta obra: lo que sucede realmente sucede, pero a la vez es ficcional” [I began to realize in the process of working that the fear is not because of the baby, but rather because of that which one cannot control, just like the mechanism of this play: what happens really happens, but it is also fictional].67 Arias’s strategies for incorporating unpredictability generate awareness in spectators of the lack of control that characterizes human life and of the fragility that defines not only humanity but also the narratives that transmit human experience from generation to generation.

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Conclusion In theatre spanning from the democratic transition to early-twentyfirst-century Argentina, the expression of human fragility has taken diverse forms, revealing the transformative engagement of performance with memory politics and human rights over the course of the postdictatorial period. Writing about mourning and violence in the aftermath of September 11, Judith Butler poses the question, “If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?”1 Underlying Antígona’s quest to perform a proper burial for her brother in Antígona furiosa, the gradual dismemberment of the Greeter, in El Saludador, and the allusions to organ trafficking in Los Albornoz is this human vulnerability. Equally prominent in the works discussed here are the performative metaphors of bodily resilience, seen in the resurrection of historical figures in Una pasión sudamericana, the excavation of bodies onstage in El hombre de arena, and the invasion and occupation of urban space by marginalized bodies in Proyecto Filoctetes. In the wake of mass violence and trauma, vulnerability and resilience arise as key notions for understanding the intersection between bodies and memory politics. Specifically, this book has examined the role of the body in the articulation of a universal subject of human rights, in exposing the exclusionary practices of neoliberalism, in questioning the limits of a discourse of national reconciliation, and in transmitting and transforming intergenerational memory. Theatre and performance (ceremony, urban intervention, activism) intervene in Argentina’s postdictatorial memory politics to articulate critical relationships between memory, history, and human rights. Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa shows the way in which forms of dramatic

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justice may at the same time complement the law and expose the limits of legal justice in addressing human rights abuses. This play, in addition to Gambaro’s La casa sin sosiego, and Atando cabos gesture toward theatre’s ability to facilitate mourning while rejecting the normative discourse of reconciliation as an integral part of democratic transition. During the nineties, the rhetoric of reconciliation became central to Menem’s vision of national harmony, imposed through ceremonial efforts to bury the past symbolically and literally. Ironically, plays such as Ricardo Monti’s Una pasión sudamericana resurrected historical bodies onstage during this period and efficiently revived the political alliances and rivalries that had been silenced by Menem’s amnesia politics. Other plays during the Menemist nineties feature characters with memory disorders originating in the context of neoliberalism and national amnesia. In El Saludador, as the Greeter’s body disintegrates, so does his memory. Fragments of his national memory interweave haphazardly with anecdotes from his international travels, and his memories of family life remain largely frozen in the past. In Cristina Escofet’s Eternity Class, members of the Pomales family substitute their flesh, blood, and mind with plastic, silicone, and a memory chip, thereby effectively replacing national memories with the “intergalactic” memory of Eternity Class. These plays demonstrate the ways in which memory politics inform human rights claims, conjure emotion in the revival of polemical national history, and reflect the fragmentation of experience resulting from the emergence of a globalized neoliberal memory framework. New Directions

Portrayals of intergenerational memory, prominent in Lola Arias’s Mi vida después, the Teatroxlaidentidad plays, and Gladys Lizarazu’s Agua, capture the coalescence of national and personal memories and focus on the younger generation in their agency in reconstructing the past from their point of view. Arias’s play introduces real characters onstage to give autobiographical testimony of their personal pasts, consistently juxtaposing their stories with specific historical referents, to heighten the intersection of private and public narratives in the reinterpretation of the past. Particularly in the area of documentary theatre, new trends and directions probe the relationships between autobiography, media,

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and memory in theatre. A precursor to Vivi Tellas’s Biodrama is her Proyecto Museos (Project Museums, 1994–2001), a project that paired theatre directors with nonartistic museums in Buenos Aires in order to “mirar la ciudad de otro modo, relacionar el teatro con una escenografía histórica y reflexionar sobre las decisiones políticas que promueven ciertas formas de exhibición” [see the city differently, relate theatre to the staging of history, and reflect upon the political decisions that promote certain forms of exposition].2 Inspired by a visit to the National Aeronautical Museum in greater Buenos Aires, the playwright, director, and filmmaker Federico León decided to create Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio (1998), an autobiographical monologue starring a veteran (Miguel Ángel Boezzio) from the Malvinas/Falklands War. Boezzio approached the performance as though it were a conference about his life. He ushered in the audience himself and delivered a monologue in which he shared personal stories and presented certificates and diplomas that he had earned throughout his life.3 Staging this play proved delicate because it challenged the silence surrounding the Malvinas/Falklands War by allowing a veteran a public forum, and more so because Miguel Ángel had spent over ten years in the José Tiburcio Borda Psychiatric Hospital, where many Malvinas/Falklands veterans ended up after the war. Though able to facilitate intimacy with audiences, the autobiographical genre here comes close to blurring exploration and exploitation of human vulnerability. Beyond an investigation of the boundaries between the real and the fictive, León’s play opens public space for the testimony of Malvinas veterans, whose own human rights claims against the military dictatorship have not been fully acknowledged legally or in public discourse. While León’s play raises questions regarding the ethical dimension of the real in autobiographical performance, other projects focus on different aspects, such as the convergence of public and private identities, seen in Confesionario, founded in 2004 and coordinated by Cecilia Szperling under the auspices of the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas. This autobiographical project brought together thirty public figures (writers, visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, and playwrights) who were asked to make a personal confession onstage.4 Participants, who included the writer Martín Kohan, the filmmaker Martín Rejtman, and the playwrights Lola Arias and Javier Daulte, among many others, introduced diary entries, work logs, e-mails, and newspaper articles to carry out their confessions. These confessions construct intimacy and

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community through voluntary exposition of the participants’ past and creative processes. The premise for Tellas’s latest investigation into documentary theatre Proyecto Archivos (2003 to present) is that “cada persona tiene y es en sí misma un archivo, una reserva de experiencias, saberes, textos, imágenes” [each person has and is an archive, a reserve of experiences, knowledge, texts, and images].5 Proyecto Archivos seeks out the theatrical in the everyday lives of individuals, an objective illustrated in unassuming titles such as Mi mamá y mi tía (My Mom and My Aunt), Tres filósofos con bigotes (Three Philosophers with Moustaches), and Escuela de Conducción (Driving School). These autobiographical projects constitute a kind of “self ” documentary theatre, in which confession and unmediated testimony heighten a sense of intimacy between spectators and performers and create an awareness of evolving forms of identity production and human interaction. Predicated on the participants’ willingness to reveal personal vulnerability, these confessions represent a refreshing counterpoint to the harrowing confessions to egregious acts committed during the dictatorship made by protagonists in Pavlovsky’s work, most notably in Potestad, and by military personnel during the nineties. Far from revealing vulnerability, these confessions seemed to ensure that power relations remained in place after the dictatorship, a status quo that nonetheless has altered because of the strengthened influence of universal legal jurisdiction and a shift in definitions of state- and universal accountability. This shift has resulted in a surge in performances of retraction, demonstrated exemplarily in the case of the ex-navy captain Adolfo Scilingo, brought to trial by Judge Baltasar Garzón in the Spanish courts in 2005, where Scilingo was ultimately sentenced to over 1,000 years of prison for crimes against humanity. The increased interest in documentary theatre in Argentina usually goes hand in hand with innovations in multimedia, as Arias’s Mi vida después demonstrates through the use of screened images, voice recordings, and photographs. Carol Martin describes new documentary theatre as the meeting of “the technological postmodern” and “oral-theatre culture.”6 She writes, “While documentary theatre remains in the realm of handcraft—people assemble to create it, meet to write it, gather to see it—it is a form of theatre in which technology is a primary factor in the transmission of knowledge” (9). Multimedia in documentary theatre serves to introduce evidence of

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past events, multiply spatial and temporal registers, and manipulate the tensions between embodied testimony and mediated narratives juxtaposed onstage. One example of this in Arias’s play is when Liza recites the news as if she were her mother (Ana Amado). Dressed in a suit from the seventies, Liza sits in front of a photographic image of the set and delivers the broadcast while a photographic image of her mother is superimposed on the paper she is reading, making it appear that her mother’s face is her own.7 It is almost impossible not to associate Arias’s Mi vida después with León’s Yo en el futuro (I, in the Future), premiered in August 2009 in Buenos Aires. Like Arias, León uses video to manipulate intergenerational relationships, though Leon’s work is less interested than Arias’s in the interaction of biography and history and is more focused on selfdocumentation and the role the camera plays in this process. Blending theatre and film techniques, Yo en el futuro introduces three men in their eighties who have filmed moments over the course of their lives since their teens. Seated onstage, the three men watch the videos of themselves from the fifties and seventies and watch videos of themselves watching the videos. At some point, the audience appears in the videos, watching the men watch the videos. Adding another theatrical dimension are the onstage characters, of varying ages, reenacting the filmed moments at the different stages of the mens’ lives. León’s interest in creating “un juego de espejos generacionales” [a game of generational mirrors]8 resonates with other recent plays that make visual images a central component in exploring memory, the passage of time, and intergenerational transmission. Jorge Goldenberg’s autobiographical Fotos de infancia (Childhood Photos), premiered in 2005 in Buenos Aires, structures the action around seven childhood photos of the actors, who develop their characters on the basis of their recollection of the circumstances surrounding the photographic images, which are projected on the back wall of the stage during the performance. Gladys Lizarazu uses this technique of positioning performers against a backdrop of photographic or filmed images (in this case a collage of world events) in her play Agua (2005) (analyzed in chapter 5), to create a common referent or frame for two generations that are clearly estranged from each other in the play. Agua focuses on the generation of youth most impacted by Argentina’s economic crisis of 2001 who, unlike their parents and grandparents, had only ever known life during the neoliberal heyday of the Menemist nineties.

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Lizarazu captures their alienation in the effusive but directionless energy they exert onstage. Another theatre practitioner who has focused on the alienation of Argentina’s youth in the wake of 2001 is Ana Alvarado, a founding member of the Object Theatre group El periférico de Objetos, who in 2008 premiered Visible in Buenos Aires as part of the Tecnoescena Theatre Festival. Created in collaboration with La Fase, a group composed of students of visual and theatre arts, Visible juxtaposes characters against an enormous computer screen onstage and investigates the ways everyday use of communicative technologies (e-mail, SMS, cell phones, computers, etc.) affect their identities. In Alvarado’s play, technology mediates social interaction between performers, but amid multiple crashes and restarts, communication becomes frustrated. Visible is also a reflection on the relationship between bodies and technology. Dressed in smooth, fitted body suits, performers throughout the play unzip and unfasten flaps to reveal keyboards and USB ports on their bodies. Occasionally, glowing computer parts and flashing cell phones are visible under their suits, as if they were a part of their bodies. This fusion of performers’ bodies with computer parts creates a twenty-first-century hybrid exhibiting both corporeal vulnerability and resilience. Furthermore, as the group La Fase relates, the idea of new objects of technology becoming obsolete at an unprecedented rate is appealing to Ana Alvarado, as well as to Emilio García Wehbi and Daniel Veronese, the other two founding members of El periférico de Objetos.9 Alvarado notes, “Rápidamente los objetos tecnológicos se convierten en fósiles y, para un lenguaje como el teatro objetal eso en realidad es una alegría enorme” [Technological objects convert into fossils very quickly, and for the language of object theatre, this is actually an enormous source of happiness].10 Introducing porcelain dolls and puppets as characters, the object theatre created as part of el Periférico de Objetos introduces productive dialogue with postdictatorial plays expressing the vulnerability of the human body. Spanning the Menemist nineties, the creative production of El periférico introduces puppets, dolls, and objects in adaptations of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (Ubú Rey, 1989), Samuel Beckett’s texts (Variaciones sobre B [Variations on B], 1990), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (El hombre de arena, 1992, discussed in chapter 4), and Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (Máquina Hamlet, 1995), to name a few of their best-known

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works. All trained as puppeteers in the prestigious program housed at the San Martín Theatre, Alvarado, Veronese, and García Wehbi create theatrical universes in which actors and puppets interact, juxtaposing bodies and objects in an investigation of what constitutes performance, interpersonal relationships, and human experience. Object-human interaction is central to the Periférico’s play Cámara Gesell (1993), named after the Gesell Dome, a one-way mirror invented by the pediatrician Arnold Gesell to observe children in clinical studies.11 The main character of this play, Tomás, played by the director-actor Laura Yusem, is the one human child in a family of dolls, manipulated by puppeteers to interact with Tomás in the portrayal of his disturbed family life. Seated extremely close to the stage, the audience perceives the action as if only separated by a one-way mirror (18). In describing Tomás’s character, Alvarado notes, “Es un cuerpo humano que se vincula con los objetos, no con los otros cuerpos que manipulan esos objetos. Potencializa su humanidad frente a los objetos. Los objetos exacerban su ‘cosidad”’ [It is a human body that interacts with objects, not with the bodies that manipulate the objects. His humanity is heightened before the objects. The objects exacerbate his “reification”] (18). This experiment of enacting family life as a comingling of objects and humans reflects the crisis of the nuclear family model promoted rigorously under the military dictatorship and, following Judith Filc’s argument, gestures toward a reimagining of the family model during postdictatorship.12 This book has presented a spectrum of plays offering a variety of reimagined models of family. Plays such as Arias’s Mi vida después and Zangaro’s A propósito de la duda, included in the Teatroxlaidentidad festival, allude to the creation of alternative families through recognition of shared interests, histories, and visions of the future.13 Other plays reveal alternative family models that are still very much informed by the experience of violence. The continued influence of violence in the construction of family discourse is evident in Gambaro’s La persistenica, a work featuring an anti-Antigone driven by hate and revenge, whose figure radically undermines postdictatorial associations between mothers and mourning. Monti’s Una pasión sudamericana, likewise, borrows from one of the most violent episodes in nineteenth-century Argentine history to imagine the restitution of a lost genealogy through the birth of Camila O’Gorman and Uladislao Gutiérrez’s unborn child. In Cossa’s El Saludador, Federico

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León’s Milquinientos metros sobre el nivel de Jack, and Los Macocos’ Los Albornoz, economic hardship has violent consequences for families, makes members susceptible to bodily harm (amputation, organ trafficking, prostitution, and electrocution), and forces a reassessment of traditional roles within the family as an economic survival strategy. Twenty-first-century plays continue to offer intimate portrayals of families in crisis, found in a diverse range of works, including Claudio Tolcachir’s La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Omission of the Coleman Family, 2005), Javier Daulte’s ¿Estás Ahí? (Are You There? 2004), Rafael Spregelburd’s Lúcido (Lucid, 2007), and Daniel Veronese’s Mujeres soñaron caballos (Women Dreamt Horses, 2001). These playwrights employ intertextuality in their work, adapting both European and national literary and dramatic traditions. While Griselda Gambaro recycles the ancient Greeks to illustrate family relationships and construct national metaphors in the eighties, Veronese turns to the nineteenth-century modernists to create family portraits charged with explosive psychological and physical energy in Espía de una mujer que se mata (Spying on a Woman Who Kills Herself, 2006), an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and El desarrollo de la Civilización venidera (The Development of Civilization to Come, 2009), a version of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The playwright Alejandro Tantanian, in turn, draws on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot in his play Los mansos (The Tame Ones, 2006), a highly conceptual work concerned with the relationship between identity construction and the creative process. Other playwrights revise Argentine theatre genres from the turn of the twentieth century. Ricardo Bartís’s De mal en peor (From Bad to Worse, 2005) borrows from the realism of the Uruguayan playwright Florencio Sánchez to tell the story of the demise of two families embroiled in a failing business venture at the beginning of the twentieth century. The theatre group Los Macocos, conversely, revisits the early-century sainete in its play El Supercrisol (Super Crucible, 2005) to address racism and xenophobia in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2001. In addition to reassessing family, recent plays analyze traditional gender roles and lend a critical eye to the construction of a discourse of masculinity, most notably in Mauricio Kartún’s La madonnita (2003), Ricardo Bartís’s La pesca (Fishing, 2007), Marcelo Mininno’s Lote 77 (Lot 77, 2008), and Susana Torres Molina’s Ella (She, 2005). This surge in interest in what constitutes the masculine might also be

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interpreted in part as ongoing ironic commentary and examination of the representations of paternity constructed by the Junta during dictatorship, and the ensuing breakdown and transformation of these representations during and after the transition to democracy. Yet other plays return to nineteenth-century national tropes, such as civilization and barbarism and the charged division between the provinces and the city of Buenos Aires. Federico León’s Cachetazo de campo (Country Slap, 1997), Patricia Zangaro’s Última luna (Last Moon, 1998), Lola Arias’s Escuálida familia (A kingdom, a country or a wasteland, in the snow, 2001),14 and Lucía Laragione’s Criaturas de aire (Creatures of Air, 2004) all revisit versions of barbarism, whether through treatment of Nazism (Laragione), family violence (Arias), or reflections on raw, uninhibited emotion (León). These works and others have acquired additional significance in light of the recent national crisis resulting from the decision of Cristina Kirchner’s government to implement an export tax on certain agricultural goods in 2008, a move that spurred protests and divided the country into supporters and opponents of the agricultural sector, once again reviving the rift between the city of Buenos Aires and the interior. Since the end of the dictatorship, playwrights and artists have criticized the social, cultural, and political effects of neoliberalism through satire, tragicomedy, and urban intervention. Although a thorough study of community theatre is beyond the scope of this book, it is important to note that neighborhood-based popular theatre and activism flourished over the course of the postdictatorial period, first to denounce the effects of dictatorship and later to demonstrate against the redistribution of wealth in the hands of the elite, the impoverishment of the low and middle classes, gentrification, and social exclusion.15 Originating under dictatorship,16 one of the most longstanding and respected community theatre groups is el Grupo Catalinas Sur, consolidated in 1983 under the direction of Adhemar Bianchi, and composed of members belonging to a generation that believed in a strong work ethic, social justice, and solidarity (41). Located near the port in the working-class neighborhood of La Boca, Catalinas Sur has created theatre collectively for over twenty-five years by regularly performing now canonical works such as Venimos de muy lejos (We Come from Far Away, 1990) and El fulgor argentino (Argentine Splendor, 1998) in an effort to stage the history of Argentina from the perspective of the neighborhood community.17

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Eduardo Balan discusses the significance of neighborhood identity in the creation of community theatre and observes that the neighborhood “pasa a ser el escenario de la transformación del mundo, la prueba cotidiana de que otra sociedad es posible” [turns into a stage for the transformation of the world, the everyday proof that another society is possible].18 The practice of linking site-specific community activism to a reassessment of global paradigms became particularly prevalent in the artistic production and activism generated in the wake of Argentina’s crisis of 2001. Andrea Giunta describes how the impact of this crisis became coupled with the aftermath of attacks on the World Trade Center in the national imaginary and produced the perception of unprecedented, radical change.19 Argentines poured into the streets, and the city transformed into a stage of protest, captured on camera and disseminated by news media across the globe. As a result of the convergence of world and local events, Giunta writes, “En forma imprevista, la Argentina estaba en el mundo” [Unforeseeably, Argentina was in the world] (27). Giunta cites Santiago Sierra’s work La Traslación de una cacerolada (The Displacement of a Cacerolada) as an emblematic example of the ways site-specific, urban protest can resonate globally (31). The artist recorded a live cacerolazo taking place in Buenos Aires in 2002 and then made a DVD of the recording and distributed it in London, Frankfurt, Geneva, New York, Madrid, and Vienna. The instructions on the DVD explain that participants should face speakers out of their windows and play the DVD at the highest possible volume at the scheduled time in order to participate simultaneously in a cacerolazo of global dimension.20 Marcela Bidegain affirms that community theatre marks a clear departure from more conventional forms of theatre in the denunciation of neoliberalism. This is certainly true in terms of organization, creative process, audience, and institutional support. And yet, it is also constructive to consider the connections between more conventional forms of theatre and community theatre, particularly when the forms concern performance, memory, and the politics of place. According to Bidegain, the group effort of community theatre facilitates the specific goal of recovering collective memory and of reconstructing neighborhood ties.21 At the same time, the wide-reaching impact of neoliberalism has created solidarity among community activists and performers that is global in nature. The tension between site-specific performance and solidarity conceived of locally and globally is very

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much present in conventional theatre as well and seen in Gambaro’s La persistencia (discussed in chapter 2) and in plays such as Eduardo Pavlovsky’s recent Solo brumas (Alone in the Haze, 2008), a devastating work drawing attention to infant mortality and hunger, specifically in the Argentine provinces of Tucumán and Jujuy, that result from the effects of global capitalism and the extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Within the larger context of postdictatorship, this book bears witness to the return to democracy during the eighties and the growing influence of global economic, legal, and cultural systems in the nineties and onward. Though site-specific, theatre reunites spectators to imagine global communities, to rethink shifting definitions of solidarity—in both a national and international framework—and to reflect on the relationship between the politics of memory and place. The plays and performances analyzed in this book participate in Argentina’s memory politics at the interface between real and imagined communities, unmediated and mediated experience, and local and global paradigms. They adapt myths to explore forms of complementary justice and propose alternative messages to national discourses of reconciliation. They promote and contest the politicization of family discourse in the public expression of human rights claims. They raise questions concerning the arrival of a culture of confession in the nineties and the globalization of accountability. Most important, the works discussed in this book trace the coming of age of a new generation of artists, whose complex postmemory has evolved to reflect the coalescence of national and global cultural, historical, legal, and economic referents, converting the reinterpretation of the past into a creative and liberating act. New trends in Argentine theatre capture perfectly this dual production of identification with the past and identity in the present and signal important new avenues of research on the engagement of theatre with memory politics, media, and identity in Argentina.

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Notes Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Discépolo, Stéfano, 135. Throughout the book, all translations are mine, unless specified otherwise. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 38. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. See also Hirsch’s “The Generation of Postmemory,” 103–128. Jelin, Los trabajos de la memoria, 124. Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, 39. Graham-Jones, Exorcising History, Argentine Theater under Dictatorship, 28. For recent scholarship on the discourse of family as it relates to constructions of national identity in Latin American Theatre, see Camilla Stevens’ Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama, and Sharon Magnarelli’s Home is Where the (He)art Is. The Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theater. Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, 66. Amado and Domínguez, Lazos de familia. Herencias, cuerpos, ficciones, 20. Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” 34. For an excellent analysis comparing the uses of family discourse under democracy in Argentina and South Africa, see Kerry Bystrom’s “The Public Private Sphere: Family Narrative and Democracy in Argentina and South Africa.” Amado and Domínguez, Lazos de familia. Herencias, cuerpos, ficciones, 14. Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, 96. Navarro, “The Personal is Political: las Madres de Plaza de Mayo;” Jelin, Women and Social Change in Latin America. Beck, What is Globalization, 12. Rebellato, Theatre & Globalization, 30. Hernández, El teatro de Argentina y Chile. Globalización, resistencia y desencanto, 22. Hernández cites Roland Robertson’s Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, in her discussion of the fragility of humanity. Nicholson, Applied Drama, 132. See Montez’s Staging Post-memories: Commemorative Argentine Theatre, 1989–2003 for a fine discussion of the relationship between commemoration, postmemory, and contemporary Argentine theatre.

210

NOTES

20. 21. 22. 23.

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269. Beck, What is Globalization?, 15. Teitel, “For Humanity,” 234. This definition taken from the preamble of the Rome Statute, quoted in Schabas, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, 21. Teitel, “For Humanity,” 231. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, 57. Scheper-Hughes, “The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs,” 62. Proyecto Filoctetes has been performed in cities around the world, including Vienna in 2002 and Berlin in 2004. Svampa, Los que ganaron, 15. See van der Kolk and van der Hart’s discussion of Freud’s theory of trauma put forth in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety in “The Intrusive Past,” 166. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 177. White, The Content of the Form, 20. Jelin, Los Trabajos de la memoria, 6. Jelin, Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales, 4. White, The Content of the Form, 24. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 4. Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the TraumaAesthetic,” 164. Schaffer and Smith, “Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Beneficiary: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull,” 1577. Méndez, “Afterword,” 162. Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the TraumaAesthetic,” 170. Diana Taylor proposes the use of the word “scenario” to emphasize the importance of paying attention to “milieux and corporeal behaviors such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language,” in The Archive and the Repertoire, 28. Huyssen, Present Palimpsests, 8. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 3. See Schechner, Performance Theory; Carlson, The Haunted Stage, and Roach, Cities of the Dead. Circum-Atlantic Performance. Trastoy, Teatro autobiográfico, 9. Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, 1. Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 156. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 10. Schechner, The Future of Ritual, 41. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar 1976–1983: del golpe de estado a la restauración democrática, 492. CONADEP, Nunca Más, 11.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

NOTES

211

51. See Victoria Ginzburg’s article, “De los dos demonios al terrorismo de Estado,” Página 12, May 15, 2006. 52. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar 1976–1983: del golpe de estado a la restauración democrática, 492. 53. CONADEP, Nunca Más, 8. 54. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar 1976–1983: del golpe de estado a la restauración democrática, 493. 55. Cohen, States of Denial, 14. 56. Graham-Jones, Exorcising History, 121. 57. For a rebuttal against claims of trial ineffectiveness see Sikkink and Booth Walling’s “The Impact of Human Rights Trials in Latin America”. 58. Malamud-Goti, Game Without End, 7. 59. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 107, 96. 60. The aim of the escrache, a form of public protest and urban intervention organized by H.I.J.O.S., is to locate, expose, and publicly shame the ex-repressor figure, making neighbors aware that they are living next to a criminal who has not been held accountable for abuses committed under dictatorship. See chapters 3 and 6 for more on the escrache. 61. http://www.hijos-capital.org.ar/. 62. See description of theatre-going experience in Beatriz Trastoy and Perla Zayas de Lima, Lenguajes escénicos, 151. 63. Personal interview with Daniel Veronese. May 2006. 64. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 8. 65. See Leigh Payne’s Unsettling Accounts. 66. Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” 84.

Chapter 1 1. Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más, 18. 2. For studies on transitional justice, see Teitel, Transitional Justice; Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice; Barahona de Brito, Carmen González-Enríquez and Paloma Aguilar, The Politics of Memory; Jelin and Hershberg, Constructing Democracy; Guillermo O’Donnell, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. 3. La Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappeared). 4. The original Nunca Más report (1984) first identified 8,960 disappeared though the estimated number of disappeared held by most official organizations and human rights groups has risen to 30,000. See Hayner, Unspeakable Acts, 33. 5. Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más, 117. 6. Sikkink cites Hayner’s observation that Uganda and Bolivia established truth commissions before Argentina in 1974 and 1982, but notes that neither of these countries published a final report. “From Pariah to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights,” 4; Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 51–53.

212

NOTES

7. Sikkink and Booth Walling, “The Impact of Human Rights Trials in Latin America,” 430. 8. Jelin, “La política de la memoria: el movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina,” 138. 9. Specifically, CONADEP referred 1086 cases to the Justice system. Nino, Juicio al mal absoluto, 133–34. 10. Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más, 124. 11. Feld, Del estrado a la pantalla: Las imágenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina, 18. 12. Kaufman, “El ritual jurídico en el juicio a los ex comandantes. La desnaturalización de lo cotidiano,” 9–10. 13. Feld, Del estrado a la pantalla: las imágenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina, 1. 14. Feld, Del estrado a la pantalla, 36; González Bombal, “Nunca más,” 211. 15. Cámara Federal, Acordada 14, March 27, 1985. Qtd. In Feld, Del Estrado a la pantalla, 20–21. Feld cites the incident in which the president of the Madres, Hebe de Bonafini, was told she must remove her white handkerchief from her head while in the courtroom, to which Bonafini responded that if the military were allowed to wear their uniforms, she should be allowed to wear her head scarf. Del estrado a la pantalla, 21. 16. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 209. 17. The complete name is “The Final Document by the Military Junta on the War against Subversion and Terrorism” [Documento Final de la Junta Militar sobre la Guerra contra la Subversión y el Terrorisimo]. 18. Acuña and Smulovitz, “Adjusting the Armed Forces to Democracy,” 16. 19. González Bombal, “Nunca Más,” 208. 20. Teitel, Transitional Justice, 6. 21. González Bombal, “Nunca Más,” 208. 22. Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más, 110. 23. Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más, 139; Kaufman, “El ritual jurídico en el juicio a los ex comandantes. La desnaturalización de lo cotidiano,” 18. 24. CELS (Center for Legal and Social Studies/Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales). Pre-existing human rights groups include SERPAJ (In Service of Peace and Justice/Servicio Paz y Justicia); APDH (Permanent Assembly of Human Rights/Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos). 25. Jelin, “La política de la memoria: El movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina,” 106. 26. Sikkink, “From Pariah State and Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights,” 1. 27. González Bombal, “Nunca Más,” 215. 28. Federación Argentina de Colegios de Abogados. 29. Nino, Juicio al mal absoluto, 115. 30. Feld, Del estrado a la pantalla: Las imágenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina, 36. 31. Of the nine generals tried, Jorge Rafael Videla and Emilio Eduardo Massera were condemned to life in prison, Roberto Eduardo Viola received seventeen

NOTES

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

213

years, Armando Lambruschini eight, and Orlando Ramón Agosti four and a half. Omar Domingo Rubens Grafigna, Leopoldo Galtieri, Jorge Isaac Araya, and Basilio Lami Dozo were asbolved. Nino, Juicio al mal absoluto, 144. The production of Señores was under the supervision of Télam, the official news agency. Feld, Del Estrado a la pantalla: Las imágenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina, 67–74. The Carapintadas (painted/camuflaged faces) Movement comprised an extremist, right-wing faction of the military that staged a series of uprisings between 1987 and 1990 against Presidents Alfonsín and Menem to denounce the judicial proceedings carried out against the military for their crimes committed during the dictatorship. ESMA (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada/The Navy Mechanics School). Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 122. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 55. See legal versus literary justice in Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious, 8. Cohen, States of Denial, 226. Interview with Laura Yusem, November 2004. Pellettieri, “El sonido y la furia: Panorama del teatro de los ’80 en la Argentina,” 47. Lusnich, “Cambio y continuidad en el realismo crítico de Griselda Gambaro y Eduardo Pavlovsky,” 346; Pellettieri, “Estudio preliminar,” 30. Arlt, “Los ’80—Gambaro—Monti—y más allá . . .,” 49–58. Tarantuviez, La escena del poder. El teatro de Griselda Gambaro, 128. Tarantuviez’s analysis builds on Kirsten Nigro’s study of the feminine subtext present in Gambaro’s silences in earlier works. Nigro, “Discurso femenino y el teatro de Griselda Gambaro,” 65. Gambaro, Antígona furiosa, 197. Puga, Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater, 183. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 4. Pellarolo, “Revisando el canon/la historia oficial: Griselda Gambaro y el heroismo de Antígona,” 7. Braun de Dunayevich and Pelento. “Las vicisitudes de la pulsión de saber en ciertos duelos especiales,” 89. Mogliani, “Antígona furiosa de Griselda Gambaro y su intertexto griego,” 102. See Taylor’s Disappearing Acts; Nieves Martínez de Olcoz’s “Cuerpo y resistencia en el reciente teatro de Griselda Gambaro,” and Marla Carlson’s “Antigone’s Bodies: Performing Torture.” On her decision to create a version of Antigone, Yusem comments, “No tuve otra opción en este momento. No fue una elección pensada—fue visceral” [I didn’t have an option at that moment. It wasn’t a contemplated decision— it was visceral]. Personal interview, November 2004. Gambaro, Antígona furiosa, 202. Quiroga, “Entrevista con Laura Yusem,” 10. Trastoy and Zayas de Lima, Los lenguajes no verbales en el teatro argentino, 29.

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NOTES

55. See Chapter 1 of Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire and Connerton’s How Societies Remember, 39. 56. Boss, Ambiguous Loss, 5–6. 57. Da Silva Catela, No habrá flores en la tumba del pasado, 114–15. 58. Rose, Mourning and the Law, 36. 59. Feld, Del estrado a la pantalla: Las imágenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina, 42. 60. González Bombal, “Nunca Más: El Juicio más allá de los estrados,” 211. 61. Trastoy, Teatro autobiográfico, 9. 62. Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, 176. 63. Goldhill, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, 150. 64. Feld, Del estrado a la pantalla: Las imágenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina, 36. 65. Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, 24. 66. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 188–89. 67. Jelin, “La política de la memoria: el movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina,” 110. 68. See Hebe de Bonafini’s speech from conference on July 6, 1988: http:// www.madres.org. 69. Guest, Behind the Disappearances, 383. 70. Jelin, “La política de la memoria: el movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina,” 130. 71. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 220. 72. Roffé, “Interview: Griselda Gambaro,” 114. 73. Segal, “Catharsis, Audience, and Closure,” 157. 74. Steiner, Antigones, xi. 75. Lacan, “The Splendor of Antigone,” 247. 76. Hall, “Is there a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?,” 305. 77. Gambaro, Antígona furiosa, 197. 78. Castellví deMoor, Dramaturgas argentinas. Teatro, política y género, 29; Pellarolo, “Revisando el canon/La historia oficial: Griselda Gambaro y el heroismo de Antígona,” 82. 79. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 221. 80. Pellarolo, “Revisando el canon/la historia oficial: Griselda Gambaro y el heroismo de Antígona,” 84. 81. See Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek’s account of her experience as dramaturg for Sophocles’ Antigone in “Two Contemporary Antigones,” 329. 82. Carlson, “Antigone’s Bodies: Performing Torture,” 390. 83. Gambaro, Antígona furiosa, 216. 84. Wannamaker, “Memory Also Makes a Chain,” 79. 85. Sophocles, Antigone, 126. 86. Puga notes that the four different stagings of Antígona furiosa spanned from 1986 to 1988, during which time both the Final Stop Law and the Law of Due Obedience were approved. Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater, 184.

NOTES

215

87. Nino, Juicio al mal absoluto, 140. 88. Barahona de Brito, González-Enriquéz, and Aguilar, The Politics of Memory, 140. 89. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 213. 90. Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” 68. 91. Gambaro, Antígona furiosa, 201. 92. Agger and Buus Jensen, Trauma and Healing under State Terrorism, 154. 93. Cohen, States of Denial, 15.

Chapter 2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más, 93. Arlt, “Los ’80—Gambaro—Monti—y más allá . . .,” 56. Marechal, “Antígona Vélez” y “Las tres caras de Venus,” 47. “Con Antígona Vélez inicia su temporada el Teatro Cervantes,” 20. Again, these are most notably the Final Stop Law (1986) and Due Obedience Law (1987). I have adapted the phrase “collapse of witnessing” from Dori Laub’s usage in “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival,” 75. Mazziotti, “Antígona: el poder y la crisis,” 4. Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, 41. Here the river is an allusion to the River Plate, where drugged prisoners were thrown to their deaths from military planes during the dictatorship. Gambaro dedicates the play to the group of young students disappeared in La Plata, Argentina on September 16 and 17, 1976, commonly referred to as “la noche de los lápices” [the night of the pencils]. The group of students had been protesting to lower the student bus fare, a form of activism deemed “subversive” by the military. Gambaro, Atando cabos, 23. See Castellvi deMoor’s analysis of Atando cabos in “Atando cabos de Griselda Gambaro o narrando la nación.” See Francine A’Ness’s discussion of Yuyachkani’s collaboration with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. A’Ness observes, “It was thought that the semiotically rich and evocative power of theater, when combined with the ritual nature of the event, might help mark the postwar transition, dignify its victims, honor the dead and disappeared, and thus prompt people to come forward and speak publicly to the Commission without fear.” In “Resisting Amnesia: Yuyachkani, Performance, and the Postwar Reconstruction of Peru,” 397. Taylor, The Archive and The Repertoire, 207. Sikkink, “From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights,” 7. “Señora” (woman, lady) does not translate very well here. In the play, the Señora plays the role of the mother of the wife and grandmother to the girl.

216

NOTES

16. This emphasis on strong intragenerational ties recalls the “deep, horizontal comradeship” envisioned by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communites, 16. 17. Gambaro, Antígona furiosa, 217. 18. Gambaro, La persistencia, 18. 19. Verónica Pagés, “El horror detrás del horror,” La Nación, June 17, 2007. 20. Ibid. 21. Roffé, “Entrevista a Griselda Gambaro,” 115. 22. Verónica Pagés, “El horror detrás del horror,” La Nación, June 17, 2007. 23. The title “La casa sin sosiego” recalls Alfonsín’s famous announcement made on the balcony of the House of Government in April 1987: “La casa está en orden y no hay sangre” [The house is in order and there is no blood]. Alfonsín made this statement after a private meeting with the leader of the Carapintada military uprisings, Aldo Rico, in which Alfonsín promised significant concession to the military in an attempt to establish stability. 24. Ovid, “Book X. Orpheus and Eurydice,” Metamorphoses, 2004. 25. Gambaro, La casa sin sosiego, 33. 26. Suárez-Orozco, “The Heritage of Enduring a ‘Dirty War’: Aspects of Terror in Argentina, 1976–1988,” 494. 27. Arditti, Searching For Life, 95. 28. See Amado, “Herencias. Generaciones y duelo en las políticas de la memoria,” 5. 29. Gelman, “Carta abierta a mi nieto.” 30. Walsh writes, “He visto la escena con sus ojos” [I have seen the scene with her eyes]. http://www.rodolfowalsh.org/spip.php?article34. 31. Amado, “Herencias, generaciones y duelo en las políticas de la memoria,” 142. 32. Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, 83. 33. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, 467. 34. Vitullo, Ficciones de una guerra. La Guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos, 79. 35. Lorenz, Las guerras por Malvinas, 122–125; Bustos, El otro frente de la guerra. Los Padres de las Malvinas, 38. 36. Other plays that discuss the Malvinas/Falklands War to some extent include Vicente Zito Lema’s Gurka (1988), with a cast that included Malvinas veterans from the Psychiatric Hospital José Tiburcio Borda; Beatriz Mosquera’s La soga (1991) ; Jorge Leyes’ Bar Ada (1997); Alejandro Acobino’s Continente Viril (Viril Continent, 2003), staged by the theater group Los Macocos; and Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio (Miguel Ángel Boezzio Museum, 1998), a monologue by Boezzio, who is a Malvinas veteran, in conjunction with Vivi Tellas’ Proyecto Museos. Films on Malvinas include Los chicos de la guerra (The Boys from the War, 1984), directed by Bebé Kamin; El visitante (The Visitor, 1999), directed by Javier Olivera; Fuckland (2000), directed by José Luis Marqués; and Iluminados por el fuego (Blessed by Fire, 2005), written by Tristan Bauer and Miguel Bonasso and directed by Bauer.

NOTES

217

37. Lorenz, Las guerras por Malvinas, 188. 38. Feinman, “La guerra y la gloria,” Radar, March 31, 2002. Qtd. in Lorenz, Las guerras por Malvinas, 298. 39. “Big rise in Argentine Kidnappings,” BBC News, June 20, 2004. 40. Fernando Rodríguez, “La clase media, ajena a los llamados de la política, fue la que salió a las calles,” La Nación, April 2, 2004. 41. Bartolomé De Vedia, “La verdadera voz de la mayoría silenciosa,” La Nación, April 2, 2004. 42. “Quiero llegar a la verdad,” La Nación, April 1, 2004. 43. Bartolomé De Vedia, “La verdadera voz de la mayoría silenciosa,” La Nación, April 2, 2004. 44. Sergio Sinay, “Juan Carlos Blumberg, un padre,” La Nación, April 16, 2004. 45. “Blumberg, entre críticas y apoyos. Diferencias sobre la nueva marcha,” La Nación, August 24, 2004. 46. “Madres del Dolor dicen no a la marcha de Blumberg,” La Nación, August 25, 2004. 47. Luis Bruschtein, “El difícil equilibrio de Blumberg,” Página 12, August 27, 2004. 48. Victoria Ginzburg, “Para no hacer diferencias entre víctimas,” Página 12, August 28, 2004. 49. “Caso Blumberg: Legítimo reclamo,” La Nación, August 30, 2004. 50. “Declaran la inconstitucionalidad de una ley que impulsó Blumberg,” Página 12, March 29, 2006. 51. Antonelli, “Dramatología de una ley que encontró su(s) cuerpo(s). En nombre del padre,” 2. 52. “Declaran la inconstitucionalidad de una ley que impulsó Blumberg,” Página 12, March 29, 2006.

Chapter 3 1. Arlt, Saverio el cruel (Saverio the Cruel, 1936); Pavlovsky, El señor Galíndez (1973), El señor Laforgue (1983). 2. The word “potestad” is often translated as “power” or “authority” in English. The term “patria potestad” refers more specifically to the exercise of parental authority. Rita Arditti writes, “Isabel Perón’s government had instituted a series of measures that reinforced the subordinate position of women in the family. The president herself had vetoed the ‘patria potestad,’ a law that would have given both parents the same legal rights over their children,” Searching for Life, 79. In the play Potestad, the Hombre’s omnipotence onstage alludes to this measure. 3. For a list of plays censored during the Proceso, see Juana Arancibia and Zulema Mirkin (20). 4. Lusnich, “Cambio y continuidad,” 350. 5. Cosentino, Eduardo Pavlovsky: Una charla con Olga Cosentino, 11.

218

NOTES

6. Pavlovsky’s plays are strikingly absent from Buenos Aires’s official theatres, The Teatro Municipal General San Martín and the Teatro Nacional Cervantes. 7. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 24. 8. Lyons, The Theatrical Space, 27. 9. See Bixler, “Signs of Absence in Pavlovsky’s ‘teatro de la memoria.” 10. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 116. 11. Pavlovsky, Potestad, 169. 12. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 116. 13. Bixler, “Signs of Absence in Pavlovsky’s ‘teatro de la memoria’,” 17. 14. Pavlovsky, Potestad, 187. 15. Schechner, Performance Theory, 170. 16. Walter Goodman, “Pavlovsky Marathon Broods over the Past,” New York Times, June 17, 1988. 17. Graham-Jones, Exorcising History, 130. 18. Dubatti, “Estudio preliminar,” Teatro Completo I, 15. 19. Foster, “Ambigüedad verbal y dramática en El señor Galíndez de Eduardo Pavlovsky,” 56. 20. Pavlovsky, Potestad, 186. 21. Avellaneda, “Hablar y callar: construyendo sentido en la democracia,” 38. 22. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 67. 23. Castellvi deMoor, “Eduardo Pavlovsky: teatro de deformación y denuncia,” 87. 24. See Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 25. Pavlovsky, “Denuncia de una represión futura,” Micropolítica de la Resistencia, 56. 26. See William G. Acree’s article “The Trial of Theatre: Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” for a discussion of Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden (1990) as another play exemplifying theatre’s role in uncovering truths not revealed in legal proceedings or state-sanctioned commissions, such as Chile’s Rettig Report. 27. Pavlovsky adapts the idea of the family as microfascism from Wilhelm Reich’s Psicología de masas del fascismo (qtd. in Teatro completo I 21). 28. See Diana Taylor’s analysis of Pavlovsky’s play Paso de dos (Pas de deux) for a discussion on the dangers of replicating authoritarian discourse through theatrical performance of torture, Disappearing Acts, 1–27. 29. Cosentino, Una charla con Olga Cosentino. Eduardo Pavlovsky: soy como un lobo, siempre voy por el borde, 65. 30. Bixler, “Signs of Absence in Pavlovsky’s ‘teatro de la memoria’,” 22. 31. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 125. 32. Pavlovsky, Pablo, 139. 33. Pellettieri, “La puesta en escena argentina de los ’80: Realismo, estilización y parodia,” 13–28. 34. Mogliani, “La concepción “La concepción escénica de Laura Yusem: la estilización del realismo,” 165.

NOTES

219

35. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 129. 36. Luis Mazas, “Pablo: un texto seductor y una puesta que lo realza,” Clarín, January 14, 1987, 10. 37. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 127. 38. Mogliani, “La concepción escénica de Laura Yusem: la estilización del realismo,”162. 39. In my analysis I use the most recent publication of the dramatic text Poroto (Nueva versión), premiered in 1998 and published in 2000. 40. Bulman, Staging Words, Performing Worlds, 126. 41. Pavlovsky, Poroto, 87. 42. Dubatti, “Estudio Preliminar,” Teatro completo III, 14. 43. Pavlovsky, Poroto, 113. 44. Dubatti, “Estudio Preliminar,” Teatro completo III, 13. 45. Dubatti, La ética del cuerpo, 85. 46. Dubatti, “Estudio Preliminar,” Teatro completo III, 15. 47. Pavlovsky, “La complicidad civil,” Micropolítica de la Resistencia, 167. 48. Carlson, Performance, 15. 49. Pavlovsky, “El fenómeno ‘entre’,” Micropolítica de la Resistencia, 139. 50. Dubatti borrows the term “epistemological metaphor” from Umberto Eco’s Obra Abierta and applies it to Pavlovsky’s second dramatic version of Poroto. Teatro completo III, 22. 51. Seoane and Nuñez, La noche de los lápices, 228. 52. For more on Pavlovsky’s use of intertextuality in his later work, see Woodyard’s “Rojos globos rojos de Pavlovsky: intertextualidad y aspectos posmodernistas”; Dubatti’s “Estudio Preliminar. Teatro Completo III ”; Giella’s “Existir, resistir y persistir: Rojos globos rojos de Eduardo Pavlovsky”; and Lusnich’s “Cambio y continuidad en el realismo crítico de Griselda Gambaro y Eduardo Pavlovsky.” 53. The screenplay of Potestad, adapted from the play, was cowritten by D’Angiolillo and Ariel Sienra. 54. Gabriela Saidón, “Memorias del subsuelo,” Clarín, May 7, 2003. 55. In the film Potestad the main character is named Eduardo, a self-reference and allusion to the young apprentice and ideologue of torture in Pavlovsky’s play El señor Galíndez. 56. The slogan “Somos derechos y humanos” plays on the word “derecho,” to mean both right and decent, and alludes to “derechos humanos” or “human rights” in Spanish. 57. Gabriela Saidón, “Memorias del subsuelo,” Clarín, May 7, 2003. 58. Vezzetti, “Activismos de la memoria: El ‘escrache’,” 3. 59. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 165. 60. Pavlovsky, “Nuevos testigos,” Clarín, June 26, 1998. 61. Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 27. 62. Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the TraumaAesthetic,” 164. 63. See Feitlowitz, “The Scilingo Effect,” A Lexicon of Terror.

220

NOTES

64. See Leigh Payne’s discussion of “vital lies” in her book Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth Nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence, 21. 65. Nunca Más, 235. See also Feitlowitz, “The Scilingo Effect,” A Lexicon of Terror, 198. 66. Verbitsky, The Flight, 3. 67. Feitlowitz, “The Scilingo Effect,” A Lexicon of Terror, 199–200. 68. Verbitsky, The Flight, 150. 69. Feitlowitz, “The Scilingo Effect,” A Lexicon of Terror, 204. 70. Verbitsky, The Flight, 151. 71. Feitlowitz, “The Scilingo Effect,” A Lexicon of Terror, 201. 72. Verbitsky, The Flight, 7. 73. Payne, Unsettling Accounts, 19. 74. See Chapter 1. 75. Feitlowitz, “The Scilingo Effect,” A Lexicon of Terror, 241. 76. Payne, Unsettling Accounts, 3. See also Catherine Cole’s “Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 167–87. 77. In 1998 the Argentine Congress revoked the Final Stop (1986) and Due Obedience (1987) laws, though the decision did not apply retroactively. In 2003 Congress annulled the laws, followed by the Supreme Court decision to annul the laws in 2005. 78. Teitel, “For Humanity,” 227. 79. Juan Carlos Algañaraz, “El represor Scilingo fue condenado en Madrid a 640 años de cárcel,” Clarín, April 20, 2005. 80. Landsman, “Legal History”. 81. Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 28. 82. “La audiencia nacional condena a Scilingo a 640 años de cárcel por genocidio y torturas,” El País, April 19, 2005. 83. “Sentencia histórica,” El País, April 20, 2005. 84. Feitlowitz, “The Scilingo Effect,” A Lexicon of Terror, 195. 85. “Sentencia histórica,” El País, April 20, 2005. 86. “Dijo que su confesión fue ‘una fantasía’, ” La Nación, June 20, 2005. 87. “Scilingo negó su participación en los ‘vuelos de la muerte’, ” La Nación. January 17, 2005. 88. “No tengo idea de los desaparecidos,” La Nación, January 20, 2005. 89. “Finalizó la primera audiencia del juicio contra Scilingo,” La Nación, January 14, 2005. 90. Juan Carlos Algañaraz, “En su primer día de juicio oral, Scilingo simuló desmayo,” Clarín, January 15, 2005. 91. Silvia Pisani, “Scilingo enfrentó el juicio en silla de ruedas y adormecido,” La Nación, January 15, 2005. 92. Ibid., January 19, 2005. 93. José Yoldi, “La acusación lee ante Scilingo los nombres de 193 desaparecidos,” El País, January 20, 2005. 94. Pavlovsky, “El señor Laforgue,” Micropolítica de la resistencia, 116.

NOTES

221

95. The Abuelas initiated efforts to establish the National Genetic Data Bank (Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos) in 1987 to serve this purpose.

Chapter 4 1. The Buenos Aires Herald speculates in retrospect that Luder probably would have won were it not for the unfortunate coffin-burning incident, “Herminio Iglesias, justicialista y trabajador,” Buenos Aires Herald, February 19, 2007. 2. Martin Prieto, “La resistible ascensión de Herminio Iglesias,” El País, November 6, 1983; Susana Viau, “Murió Herminio, el del cajón,” Página 12, February 17, 2007. 3. See Nino, Juicio al mal absoluto, 118. 4. Pellettieri, “La crueldad trascendida,” 17. 5. This episode was mentioned in the press and academic journals in Argentina and recently has been discussed in Ana Elena Puga’s Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater. The version of events described here was taken from a conversation with Laura Yusem (May 2004), the director of the play, who was present during the episode. 6. The Montoneros were a Peronist-associated guerrilla militancy group active during the sixties and seventies. 7. Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 205. 8. Guber, Por qué Malvinas? 47. 9. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 92–93. 10. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 10. 11. Prieto, Proyección del rosismo en la literatura argentina, 14. 12. Rock, Argentina 1516–1987. From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín, 105. 13. Nino, Juicio al mal absoluto, 97. 14. Rock, Argentina 1516–1987. From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín, 106. 15. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, 467. 16. Zayas de Lima, “Censura teatral en Buenos Aires en la época del Proceso,” 263. 17. See Puga, Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theatre; Nuetzel, “Of Melons, Heads, and Blood”; Magnarelli, “Authoring the Scene”; Giordano, “La malasangre de Griselda Gambaro”; Foster, “La malasangre de Griselda Gambaro”; Boling, “Reyes y Princesas”; Nigro, “Discurso femenino y el teatro de Griselda Gambaro”; Messinger Cypess, “La dinámica del monstruo.” 18. Under Rosas, “melones” referred to decapitated heads. The color red is associated with the Rosas regime because the dictator made it obligatory for everyone to wear a red ribbon (la divisa punzó) in support of his federation. Many opponents to the Rosas regime sought refuge in Montevideo. The mazorqueros belonged to La mazorca, Rosas’s secret police known for their cruelty and ruthlessness in carrying out Rosas’s orders. 19. González Bombal. Qtd. in Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, 485. 20. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, 485.

222

NOTES

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Ibid., 504; Nino, Juicio al mal absoluto, 114. Halperin Donghi, “El presente transforma el pasado,” 74. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, 484–493. Halperin Donghi, “El presente transforma el pasado,” 80. Jean Graham-Jones observes that playwrights during the early eighties still relied on metaphor to avert censorship, but at the same time “took the first steps toward a critical self-distancing,” Exorcising History: Argentine Theatre under Dictatorship, 88. Deforel and Lanteri, “El teatro,” 114. The proscriptos–intellectual dissidents who opposed the federal regime—responded to the glorious version of national unity being represented on Rosas’s official stages with narratives filled with impossible romances, misadventures and suicides, 115. Bartólome Mitre and Juan Bautista Alberdi explicitly addressed the national panorama under Rosas in their plays Cuatro épocas (1840) and El Gigante Amapolas y sus formidables enemigos (1841), respectively, but their plays were written in exile and were never produced in Argentina under the Rosas regime. Diario de la Tarde, N. 5948, July 16, 1851. Qtd. in Deforel and Lanteri, 115. Schechner, The Future of Ritual, 41. Diario de la Tarde, N. 3204, April 18, 1842. Qtd. in Deforel and Lanteri, 115. Castagnino, “El teatro de la época rosista,” 402–404. British Packet, N. 721, May 5, 1841. Qtd. in Castagnino, “El teatro de la época rosista,” 403. Castagnino, “El teatro de la época rosista,” 404. Jorge Lanata, “Indulto,” Página 12, October 8, 1989. Rock, Authoritarian Argentina, 119. See Ibid., 100; Sábato, “Olvidar la memoria,” 8. Anchorena, La repatriación de Rosas, 32. “Menem llega,” Página 12, September 30, 1989. “Rosas: Menem recibe los restos,” La Nación, September 30, 1989. Daniel Capalbo, Página 12, October 1, 1989. “Fueron repatriados,” La Nación, October 1, 1989. Menem’s use of medical metaphors is surprising given that they were often used by the military during the dictatorship. “Quirófano” (Operating Room), for example, was used to refer to the torture chambers and military referred to leftist subversion as the cancer of the nation. El cronista, October 2, 1989. Qtd. in Anchorena, 105. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 3. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 176. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 5. See Joseph Roach’s chapter “Echoes in the Bone,” in his book Cities of the Dead, for an elaboration on Kantorowicz’s ideas, 33–71. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 418. Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, 29.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

NOTES

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

223

Cortés Rocca and Kohan, Imágenes de vida, relatos de muerte, 79. Guber, “Las manos de la memoria,” 427. La prensa, April 7, 1989. Qtd. in Guber, “Las manos de la memoria,” 430. Guber, “Las manos de la memoria,” 436. Eloy Martínez, “Necrofilias argentinas,” 133. Esther Fein, “Bury Lenin? Russian Die-Hards Aghast,” The New York Times, April 28, 1989. As Foucault states, the “political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use,” Discipline and Punish, 25. Vezzetti, “Variaciones en la memoria social,” 2–3. See Trastoy and Zayas de Lima, Lenguajes escénicos, 44. Rokem, Performing History, 11. More specifically, the play was premiered in the Martín Coronado Theatre of the San Martín complex, a venue critics argued was too large. Monti, Una pasión sudamericana, 33. Sagaseta, La dramaturgia de Ricardo Monti: La seducción de la escritura, 236. César Magrini, “Dos estrenos municipales,” El Economista, December 1, 1989. González, “Ricardo Monti, su pasión y el combate por la historia,” 20. Pellettieri, “Introduction. El teatro de Ricardo Monti (1989–1994),” 32. Trastoy, “Metadrama y autorreferencia,” 22. See Goffman, Frame Analysis, 83. White, The Content of the Form, 20. White writes, “Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind,” Metahistory, 7. Sorensen, Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture, 5. Monti, Una pasión sudamericana, 33. See Pellettieri, “Una tragedia sudamericana,” La escena latinoamericana, 32. Monti, Una pasión sudamericana, 38. Martínez Estrada, Radiografía de la Pampa, 12. Ng˜ug˜ı, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, 38. Graham-Jones, Reason Obscured, 22. Bennett, Theatre Audiences, vii. Notes accessed from the Center of Documentation at the San Martín Theatre, July 22, 2009. Pellettieri, “El teatro de Ricardo Monti (1989–1994),” 18. Rodríguez, “El intertexto de Roa Bastos en Una pasión sudameriana de Ricardo Monti,” 13. Avery, “A Return to Life: The Right to Identity and the Right to Identify Argentina’s Living Disappeared,” 257. Carla Pezzi, “Entrevista a Ricardo Monti,” 106. Trastoy, “El teatro argentino de los últimos años: del parricidio al filicidio,” 2; Tirri, “Los Parricidas: Monti y Gentile,” 1973. Marechal, “Antígona Vélez” y “Las tres caras de Venus,” 58.

224

NOTES

83. Deforel and Lanteri, “El teatro,” 114. 84. Carlos Pezzi, “Entrevista a Ricardo Monti,” 106. As Graham-Jones points out, this reference to the end of the world also evokes Argentina’s geographic remoteness. 85. The original founders of El periférico de objetos are Daniel Veronese, Ana Alvarado, and Emilio García Wehbi. 86. Dubatti, “La dramaturgia del primer Daniel Veronese 1990–1993,” 25. 87. Dubatti, “Prólogo,” 30. 88. See description of theatre-going experience in Beatriz Trastoy and Perla Zayas de Lima, Lenguajes escénicos, 151. 89. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 39. 90. Hilda Cabrera, “El hombre de arena. Los muñecos diabólicos,” Página 12, May 5, 1992. 91. Nina Cortese, “El hombre de arena,” Ámbito financiero, May 13, 1992. 92. Alejandro Tantanian, “Un leviatán teatral,” http://www.analvarado.com/ nota.html, April 2002. 93. Dubatti, “La dramaturgia del primer Daniel Veronese 1990–1993,” 29. 94. Dubatti, “Prólogo,” 30. 95. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” 150. 96. See Chapter 1. 97. For further analyses on theatre of the nineties and its relationship to the politics of Menemism, see Proaño Gómez’s Poéticas de la Globalización en el Teatro Latinoamericano, 2007.

Chapter 5 ∗

A section of chapter 5 was first published as the article “Global Imaginings of Argentina’s Middle Class in Roberto Cossa’s El Saludador (1999) and Cristina Escofet’s Eternity Class (2000),” in GESTOS, Revista de teoría y práctica de teatro hispánico.

1. Roberto Cossa’s El Saludador (The Greeter, 1999), Federico León’s Mil quinientos metros sobre el nivel de Jack (Fifteen Hundred Meters above the Level of Jack, 1999), Cristina Escofet’s Eternity Class (2000), and the theatre group Los Macocos’ Los Albornoz (Delicias de una familia argentina) (The Albornoz’s [Delights of an Argentine Family], 2001). 2. Fuld writes that the Ley de Avellaneda (1876)—a law promoting European immigration to Argentina—would pave the way for the arrival of over 4 million immigrants to Argentina. In “Los inmigrantes limítrofes. ¿Culpables de la desocupación en la Argentina?” Realidad económica, 7–28. 3. Seibel, Historia del teatro argentino, 374, 625. 4. Wortman, Pensar en las clases medias, 32. 5. Seibel, Historia del teatro argentino, 339. 6. Pellarolo, Sainete Criollo. Democracia/Representación. El caso de Nemesio Trejo, 41, 53.

NOTES

225

7. Viñas, Grotesco, inmigración y fracaso, 13. 8. David Viñas calls the grotesco criollo the “sofocada elegía del ‘progreso’ liberal” [the stifled elegy of liberal “progress”] (59). 9. Svampa, Los que ganaron, 19–21. 10. Avelar, The Untimely Present, 11. 11. Svampa, Los que ganaron, 39, 15. 12. Olga Cosentino, “Viajando se hace la revolución,” La Nación, June 26, 1999. 13. Pellettieri, “Roberto Cossa y el teatro dominante,” 28. 14. Cossa, El Saludador, 116. 15. Magnarelli, Home Is Where the (He)art Is, 106. 16. Gail Bulman identifies Cossa’s adeptness at creating uneasy laughter in audiences in her fine examination of humor and catharsis in El Saludador in “Humor and Catharsis in Roberto Cossa’s El Saludador,” 5. 17. Trastoy and Zayas de Lima, Lenguajes escénicos, 80. 18. Avelar, The Untimely Present, 7. 19. For an excellent analysis of the formal elements of the staging and a discussion on the reassessment of family roles in the play, see Sharon Magnarelli’s Home is Where the (He)art Is, 95–118. 20. Appadurai, Globalization, 6. 21. Cossa, El Saludador, 117. 22. See Bulman, “Humor and Catharsis in Roberto Cossa’s El Saludador,” 11. 23. Csordas, “Introduction,” Embodiment and Experience, 12. 24. Keane, “Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere,” 8. Also see Nestor García Canclini’s discussion of Keane’s micro-, meso-, and macro-public spheres in La Globalización imaginada, 187–88. 25. According to Osvaldo Pellettieri, the realism of the sixties in Argentina reflects the combined influence of contemporary playwrights such as Arthur Miller and the turn-of-the-century realism that was consolidated in Florencio Sánchez’s naturalist tragedies. Pellettieri identifies Cossa’s Nuestro fin de semana (1964) and Ricardo Halac’s Soledad para cuatro (Solitude for Four, 1961) as the sixties plays that best capture the essence of this “reflexive realism.” In Cien años de teatro argentino, 145–46. The sainete and grotesco criollo are early-twentieth-century genres that, to a great extent, capture the experience of immigration and its impact on national identity in Argentina. The origins of these genres can be found in Spain’s sainete and Italy’s grottesco, respectively, although the genres metamorphose and become distinctly Argentine. For in-depth descriptions of the sainete and the grotesco criollo genres in Argentina, see Pellettieri’s Cien años de teatro argentino, Viñas’s Grotesco, inmigración y fracaso: Armando Discépolo, and Kaiser-Lenoir’s El grotesco criollo: estilo teatral de una época. 26. Pellettieri includes much of Cossa’s work, including El Saludador, in the category of reflexive realism with the sainete as intertext.“Roberto Cossa y el teatro dominante,” 27–35. 27. Pellettieri, “Roberto Cossa y el teatro dominante,” 32. 28. Graham-Jones, Exorcising History, 144.

226

NOTES

29. María de los Ángeles Sanz, “Tras la senda da una identidad,” 51. 30. Cossa, El Saludador, 116. 31. Luis Ordaz refers to the genealogy of antiheroes in Argentine theatre and includes Roberto Arlt’s Saverio el cruel (1936) in this list. Breve Historia del Teatro Argentino, 151–52. 32. Germani, Política y sociedad, 182. 33. Kaiser-Lenoir, El grotesco criollo: estilo teatral de una época, 53. 34. Discépolo, Mateo, 333. 35. Kaiser-Lenoir, El Grotesco criollo: estilo de una época, 73. 36. Discépolo, Stéfano, 142. 37. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) was particularly important for Cossa because of the play’s emphasis on the relationship between one’s profession and sense of self-worth, a relationship that has been explored amply in Argentine theatre, already in Sánchez’s M’hijo el dotor (My Son the Doctor, 1903) and later in Osvaldo Dragún’s Historias para ser contadas (Stories to Be Told, 1957) and Ricardo Talesnik’s La fiaca (Laziness, 1967). 38. Cossa, Nuestro fin de semana, 74. 39. Escofet’s Eternity Class is the one play discussed in this book that has yet to be staged. 40. Ibid., 95. 41. Escofet, “La diferencia, siempre la diferencia,” Teatro, 17. Lola Proaño Gómez and Phyllis Zatlin stress the importance of humor in Escofet’s dramaturgy. See Zatlin, “Feminist Metatheatricalsim: Escofet’s Ritos del corazón,” and Proaño Gómez, “De la inmanencia a la trascendencia: Una conversación con Cristina Escofet.” 42. Escofet, Eternity Class, 66. 43. Turner, “Bodies and anti-bodies: flesh and fetish in contemporary social theory,” 27. 44. Svampa, Los que ganaron, 33. 45. García Canclini, Cultura y Comunicación, 50. 46. “La gente asocia la calidad con los símbolos de los 90,” La Nación, April 25, 1999. 47. Inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, Benjamin writes in his Theses on the Philosophy of History IX: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Illuminations 257). 48. During the late nineties and after 2001 the cartoneros typically worked at night and used enormous carts to haul their goods as they collected recyclable items from garbage left on the streets of Argentina’s largest cities, especially Buenos Aires.

NOTES

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

227

Escofet, Eternity Class, 78. Borón, “Los axiomas de Anillaco,” 77. Svampa, Los que ganaron, 69. See Grimson, “Ethnic (In)visibility in Neoliberal Argentina.” As in other major cities in Latin America, Europe, and the United States during the sixties, universities became catalysts for cultural revolution. In Argentina, this decade marked the birth of EUDEBA, the University of Buenos Aires publishing house, and the foundation of the avant-garde institute Torcuato di Tella. This cultural growth was repressed in 1966, when General Onganía became president in a military coup and began instituting violent measures to control “communist tendencies” that the military regime increasingly associated with left-wing intelligentsia. On July 29, 1966, the police stormed numerous departments at the University of Buenos Aires and beat professors and students, an event that is now referred to as the “noche de bastones largos” (The Night of the Long Truncheons). In Romero, Breve historia contemporánea de la Argentina, 218–269. The playwright, too, was ousted from the Philosophy Department at the University of La Plata in the seventies because of her opposition to the Anti-communist Association of Argentina (Asociación Anticomunista Argentina). In Zatlin, “Feminist Metatheatricalism,” 19. Romero, Breve historia contemporánea de la Argentina, 387. Olga Cosentino, “Viajando se hace la revolución,” La Nación, June 26, 1999. Svampa, Los que ganaron, 28–30. Presentation by Carlos Gorostiza at the XVII Congreso Internacional de Teatro Iberoamericano y Argentino, Buenos Aires, August 6, 2009. Gorostiza, El puente, 35. Qtd. in Alejandro Cruz, “Una experiencia que alteró la rutina callejera,” La Nación, November 17, 2002. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9. Nora Sánchez, “Muñecos esparcidos por toda Buenos Aires causaron sorpresa,” Clarín, November 16, 2002. Ibid. Ibid. Alejandro Cruz, “Una experiencia que alteró la rutina callejera,” La Nación, November 17, 2002. “Repercusión en la gente y en la policía,” La Nación, November 17, 2002. Nora Sánchez, “Muñecos esparcidos por toda Buenos Aires causaron sorpresa,” November 16, 2002. See comments by Daniel Veronese in Dubatti, “Prólogo,” La deriva, 27, 30. See Diéguez Caballero’s Escenarios liminales and Persino’s “Reflexiones sobre una intervención urbana: El Proyecto Filoctetes.” For a discussion on surveillance, voyeurism, and performance, see Coco Fusco’s interview with Ricardo Domínguez in “On-Line Simulations/RealLife Politics: A Discussion with Ricardo Domínguez on Staging Virtual Theatre,” 151–162.

228

NOTES

70. Horacio Cecchi, “El día de los falsos muertos,” Página 12, November 16, 2002. 71. It must be noted that the premiere took place in June, six months before the major upheavals of December 2001. 72. Los Macocos, Los Albornoz, 219. 73. Dubatti, “Estudio Preliminar,” 38. 74. Wortman, Construcción imaginaria, 89. 75. Los Macocos, Los Albornoz, 240. 76. Wortman, Construcción imaginaria, 91. 77. Sarlo, Esencas de la vida posmoderna, 78. 78. Ibid., 85. 79. Los Macocos, Los Albornoz, 243–244. 80. Proaño Gómez, Políticas de la globalización en el teatro latinoamericano, 140, 143. For further reading on the impact of globalization on Argentine theatre, see Paola Hernández’s El teatro de Argentina y Chile. Globalización, resistencia y desencanto. 81. León, Registros. Teatro reunido y otros textos, 172–173. 82. Dubatti, “Estudio preliminar. Teatro Deshecho I,” 142. 83. Los Macocos, Los Albornoz, 219. 84. Pellarolo, Sainete Criollo: Democracia, representación; El caso de Nemesio Trejo, 57. 85. Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 84. 86. Likewise in Cossa’s play, when the Saludador returns home for the last time without his legs, arms, and one eye, audiences learn that he has been made president of the world association of organ donors and, as such, felt he had to serve as an example.1 87. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, “The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs,” 62. 88. Los Macocos, Los Albornoz, 250. 89. Particularly common after 2001, the cacerolazos were demonstrations in which Argentines banged pots and pans together (cacerolas) in the streets and from their balconies to denounce the economic measures implemented during the crisis. 90. Wortman, “Enigmas y desafíos tras el conflicto,” Página 12, July 31, 2008.

Chapter 6 1. Organizers of Teatro Abierto included the playwrights Osvaldo Dragún and Roberto Cossa; actors Jorge Rivera López, Luis Brandoni, and Pepe Soriano; Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel; and the writer Ernesto Sábato. 2. For detailed studies of Teatro Abierto, see Giella, Teatro Abierto 1981, Vol. I, 13–62; Graham-Jones, “Vigilant, Vigilante Theatre: Teatro Abierto (1981– 1985),” Exorcising History, 89–122; Taylor, “Staging Battles of Gender and Nation-ness: Teatro Abierto 1981,” Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” 223–254; Trastoy, “Teatro

NOTES

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

229

Abierto 1981: un fenómeno social y cultural,” Historia del Teatro Argentino en Buenos Aires, Vol. V, 104–111. Graham-Jones, Exorcising History, 90–91. Giella, Teatro Abierto 1981, Vol. I, 39–40. Graham-Jones, Exorcising History, 91. Rodríguez and Lusnich, “La Recepción del Teatro del Arte,” 220. By February 2010 the Abuelas had helped recover the identities of 101 stolen grandchildren. “ ‘Tener identidad es lo más lindo que hay’ dijo el nieto 101,” La Nación, February 23, 2010. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/ nota.asp?nota_id=1236384. De los Ángeles Sanz, “Un significado en busca de un significante,” 51. Ogás Puga, “Teatroxlaidentidad: Un teatro en busca de su identidad,” 14. The quote is taken from the manifesto posted on the site for Teatro del Pueblo: http://www.teatrodelpueblo.org.ar/teatro_abierto/. Teatroxlaidentidad. Obras de teatro del Ciclo 2001, 23. Jelin, Los trabajos de la memoria, 126. Kaës, Transmisión de la vida psíquica entre generaciones, 21. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” Testimony, 84. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 168. H.I.J.O.S.: Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Children for Identity and Justice, Against Forgetting and Silence). Arditti, Searching for Life, 21. The legal scholar Laura Oren notes that over time and as a result of the many diverse and complex custody arrangements that arose, the Abuelas began to focus more on the restitution of identity than the return of children to biological relatives, “Righting Child Custody Wrongs: The Children of the ‘Disappeared’ in Argentina,” 194. Arditti, Searching for Life, 103. De Bianchedi et al., “Acerca de los orígenes: Verdad-mentira, transmisión generacional,” Restitución de niños. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. La historia de Abuelas. 30 años de búsqueda, 131. Arditti, De por vida. La historia de una búsqueda. Qtd. in La historia de Abuelas. 30 años de búsqueda, 131. La historia de Abuelas. 30 años de búsqueda, 48. Arditti, Searching for Life, 72. Ibid., 146. Oren, “Righting Child Custody Wrongs: The Children of the ‘Disappeared’ in Argentina,” 186. http://conadi.jus.gov.ar/home_fl.html. La historia de Abuelas. 30 años de búsqueda, 119. Ibid. Amado, Ana, “Órdenes de la memoria y desórdenes de la ficción,” Lazos de la Familia, 49. Kordon and Edelman, Por-venires de la memoria, 65.

230

NOTES

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Pablo Zunino, “El teatro tiene memoria,” La Nación, November 21, 1997. Pablo Zunino, “La gran catarsis colectiva,” La Nación, November 28, 1997. Ibid. La historia de Abuelas. 30 años de búsqueda, 151. After the first cycle of Teatro por la Identidad, more than 70 young people approached the Abuelas with uncertainties regarding their identity. http://www.teatroxlaidentidad.net/editables/. Teatroxlaidentidad. Obras de teatro del Ciclo 2001, 9. Bystrom, “The Public Private Sphere: Family Narrative and Democracy in Argentina and South Africa,” 14. Zangaro, A propósito de la duda, 156. Herrera and Tenembaum, Identidad, despojo y restitución, 13. Arditti, Searching for Life, 134–137. For psychological evidence in favor of restitution, see E. T. De Bianchedi et al, “Acerca de los orígenes: Verdad-mentira, transmisión generacional,” Restitución de niños. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, 299–310. La historia de Abuelas. 30 años de búsqueda, 106. Zangaro, A propósito de la duda, 156. Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, 98. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 171. See chapter 3. Zangaro, A propósito de la duda, 159. The murga is a popular form of music and dance performed predominantly during the carnival season in Uruguay that features a chorus, a powerful drum beat, brightly costumed murgueros with painted faces, and lyrics with political and social content. The murga has been incorporated as a key element in the performance of the escraches in Argentina since the mid-nineties. Zangaro, A propósito de la duda, 161. See Patricia Sicouly’s comprehensive study: Teatroxlaidentidad: Un teatro para la memoria. Hilda Cabrera, “Teatro por la Identidad, a ocho años de su primera temporada,” Página 12, November 15, 2008. Forming part of the Buenos Aires Theatre Complex (Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires), the Sarmiento Theatre has the reputation for staging more experimental plays. Tellas quoted in Moreno, “Padres nuestros,” 1. Cornago, “Biodrama: Sobre el teatro de la vida y la vida del teatro,” 5. Alejandro Cruz, “Vivi Tellas abre su personal archivo,” La Nación, July 30, 2008. Ibid., March 22, 2009. In describing La vida después, Arias repeatedly refers to the idea of a “remake” of the lives of the parents. Juan José Santillán, “Un abanico de historias generacionales,” Clarín, March 16, 2009. Arias, Mi vida después, 1. María Moreno, “Padres nuestros,” Página 12, April 26, 2009.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

NOTES

231

61. Brownell, “El teatro antes del futuro: sobre Mi vida después de Lola Arias,” 11. 62. Freire, “Teatro documental: el referente como inductor de lectura,” 5. 63. Playbill text quoted in Pamela Brownell, “El teatro antes del futuro: sobre Mi vida después de Lola Arias,” 1. 64. Ibid., 1. 65. Arias, Mi vida después, 19. 66. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_3479.html. Accessed February 6, 2010. 67. Interview with María Fernanda Pinta, “Escenas de un discurso I. Entrevista a Lola Arias,” 6.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Butler, Precarious Life, 30. Proyecto Museos, 1. Leon, Registros. Teatro reunido y otros textos, 64. Szperling, Confesionario. Historia de mi vida privada, 5. Tellas, “Vidas prestadas,” 1. Martin, “Bodies of Evidence,” 9. This use of the superimposition of photographic images is reminiscent of Lucila Quieto’s photographic exhibition “Arqueología de la ausencia” (Archaeology of Absence) (Espacio ecléctico, Buenos Aires, 2002), in which images of children of the disappeared are juxtaposed and superimposed upon old photographic images of their parents. Hilda Cabrera, “Veo la obra como un organismo vivo,” Página 12, September 12, 2009. http://grupolafase.blogspot.com/2009/08/escenas-de-la-vida-digitalreportaje.html. August 5, 2009. Accessed February 9, 2010. Alvarado, quoted by La Fase. http://grupolafase.blogspot.com/2009/08/ escenas-de-la-vida-digital-reportaje.html. August 5, 2009. Accessed February 9, 2010. Alvarado, “El Objeto de las Vanguardias del siglo XX en el Teatro Argentino de la Post-dictadura. Caso Testigo: El Periférico de Objetos,” 18. See Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983. Again, this is in line with Filc’s argument in Entre el parentesco y la política. Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983, 96. Jean Graham-Jones translated this work and three others for the festival BAiT (Buenos Aires in Translation, New York City, May 2006), compiled in the anthology BAiT: Buenos Aires in translation: 4 plays from Argentina. Bidegain, Marianetti, and Quain, Vecinos al rescate de la memoria olvidada, 1–19. Many of the founding members of Catalinas Sur originally belonged to the parents’ association corresponding to School Number 6, Carlos Della Penna,

232

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

NOTES

in the neighborhood La Boca. Bidegain, Marianetti, and Quain, Vecinos al rescate de la memoria olvidada, 40. http://www.catalinasur.com.ar/. Balan, Encuentro Cultura y democracia participativa. Diez claves para la Acción Cultural, Buenos Aires, November 2–4, 2007. Qtd. in Bidegain, Marianetti, and Quain, Vecinos al rescate de la memoria olvidada, 24. Giunta, Poscrisis. Arte argentino después de 2001, 27. http://www.santiago-sierra.com/200210_1024.php. Bidegain, Marianetti, and Quain, Vecinos al rescate de la memoria olvidada, 20.

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Index Absurd, 55, 60, 70, 78, 126, 167 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo), 5, 18, 30, 67–8, 77, 87, 125, 173, 175, 177–86, 191–2 Act of transfer, 39 Aerolineas Argentinas, 116 Agamben, Giorgio, 159 Agger, Inger, 47 Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 118 Aleandro, Norma, 90 Alfonsín, Raúl, 17, 26, 31, 42, 49, 52, 65, 87, 99, 115 Alvarado, Ana, 202–3 Visible, 202 Amado, Ana, 4–5, 24, 64, 180, 201 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 179 American Convention on Human Rights, 30 Amnesty, 13, 24, 69–70, 94–5, 99, 105, 113, 125, 130 Amnesty International, 95 Anchorena, Manuel de, 111 Anouilh, Jean, 44 Antonelli, Mirta, 68 Aparición con vida (Appearance/ Returned Alive), 36, 42 Appadurai, Arjun, 139 Aramburu, Pedro Eugenio, 115 Archivo biográfico familiar de Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Family Biography Archive of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo), 178

Arditti, Rita, 63, 178–9, 216 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 29 Arias, Lola, 20, 174, 191–5, 198–205 Airport Kids, 195 El amor es un francotirador (Love is a Sniper), 195 Escúalida familia (A kingdom, a country or a wasteland, in the snow), 205 Mi vida después (My Life After), 195, 198, 200–3 Striptease, 195 Sueño con Revolver (Revolver Dream), 195 Aristotle’s Poetics, 44 Arlt, Mirta, 36, 51 Arslanián, León Carlos, 32 Artaud, Antonin, 129 Articles 7 and 8 (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), 179 Astiz, Alfredo, 93 Avelar, Idelber, 138–9 Avery, Lisa, 125–6 Balan, Eduardo, 206 Balza, Martín, 14, 46, 93 Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos (National Genetic Data Bank), 179, 188 barbarism, 41, 106, 118, 121–3, 205 Bartís, Ricardo, 72, 204 De mal en peor (From Bad to Worse), 204 Bassi, Valentina, 176, 182

250

Battle of Caseros, 103 Beck, Ulrich, 6 Beckett, Samuel, 202 Bennett, Susan, 13, 101, 123, 168 Bertuccio, Marcelo, Señora, esposa, niña y joven desde lejos (Señora, Wife, Girl, and Young Man from Afar), 58, 193 Beslan, 58–9 Bianchedi, E.T. de, 178 Bianchi, Adhemar, 205 Bidegain, Marcela, 206 Biodrama, 192, 199 Bixler, Jacqueline, 72–3, 77 Blau, Herbert, 38 Blumberg, Juan Carlos, 66–8 Boal, Augusto, 90, 161 coercive system of tragedy, 90 invisible theatre, 161 bodily integrity, 7–10, 169 Bonafini, Hebe de, 42, 67 Booth Walling, Carrie, 27 Borón, Atilio, 153–4 Bortnik, Aida, 90 La historia oficial (The Official Story), 17, 90–1 Boss, Pauline, 39, 163 Braun Dunayevich, Julia, 37 Brecht, Bertolt, 18, 44 Briski, Norman, 72, 80, 81 Brownell, Pamela, 194 Bulman, Gail, 80 Butler, Judith, 44, 197 Buus Jensen, Søren, 47 Bystrom, Kerry, 183 Cabrera, Hilda, 129 Cafiero, Antonio, 115 Carlotto, Estela de, 77 Carlson, Marla, 38, 45 cartonero, 152 Castagnino, Raúl, 109 Castellví deMoor, Magda, 44, 76 cataphoric structure, 75 Catela, Ludmila da Silva, 39–40 Catharsis, 58, 90, 138, 156

INDEX

caudillismo, 100, 103, 106, 112, 127 cautiva, 190 Cavallo, Domingo, 136 Centro clandestino de detención (Clandestine Detention Center), 26 Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, 182, 199 Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (The Center for Legal and Social Studies, CELS), 30 civilization, 106, 118–20, 204–5 coercive system of tragedy, 90 Cohen, Stanley, 17, 35, 48 Comisión del Grupo de Padres de Soldados de Las Malvinas (The Commission of the Group of Parents of Soldiers of Malvinas), 78 Comisión Nacional de Padres y Familiares de Combatientes Desaparecidos en Malvinas (The National Commission of Parents and Family Members of Combatants Disappeared in Malvinas), 78 Comisión Nacional por el Derecho a la Identidad (National Commission for the Right to Identity, CONADI), 196 Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappeared, CONADEP), 26, 30 Confederación General del Trabajo (General Confederation of Labor, CGT), 114 conventillo, 134–6, 157 Cornago, Óscar, 192 Correa, Rubens, 207 Corrientes Avenue, 99, 174 Cortese, Nina, 129 Cosentino, Olga, 71, 156

INDEX

Cossa, Roberto, 8, 20, 23, 113, 136–47, 155, 162, 169, 171, 181, 203 ¿Vos sabés quién sos? (Do you know who you are?), 181–2 De pies y manos (Of Feet and Hands), 141 El Saludador, 8, 23, 133, 136–41, 145–56, 162, 169, 171, 197–8, 203 La Nona, 141, 164 Los compadritos, 141 Nuestro fin de semana (Our Weekend), 142, 146–7, 164 Cosse, Villanueve, 181 country, 135–6 Crenzel, Emilio, 27, 29–30 crimes against humanity, 7, 15, 22, 69, 94–7, 200 Csordas, Thomas, 140 Cura, Mario, Madresperanza, 188 Dago, Tito, 72 D’Angiolillo, Luis César, 21, 70, 85 Daulte, Javier, 192, 199, 204 ¿Estás ahí? (Are you There?), 204 Nunca estuviste tan adorable (You Were Never so Adorable), 192 Derrida, Jacques, 95 Desert Conquest, 190 Diéguez Caballero, Ileana, 161 “Dirty War”, 16, 66 Discépolo, Armando, 1, 138, 142–4 Mateo, 142–6 Stéfano, 1, 142, 144–6 disjunctive flows, 154 Distéfano, Juan Carlos, 47 Divine Comedy, 118 Doctrina de los dos demonios (Doctrine of Two Demons), 15–16, 106 Domínguez, Nora, 4–5 Donghi, Tulio Halperín, 105–6 Dorfman, Ariel, La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden), 218

251

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Idiot, 204 Dubatti, Jorge, 75–6, 80, 85, 128–9, 162, 168 Eco, Umberto, 85 Edelman, Lucila, 181 Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army, ERP), 15–16 El Documento Final (The Final Document), 29 El Periférico de objetos, 19, 100, 128–30, 161, 202–3 Cámara Gesell, 203 El hombre de arena (The Sandman), 100, 127–9, 161, 202 Variaciones sobre B (Variations on B), 202 Entel, 116 Escofet, Cristina, 23, 133, 148–9, 151, 153, 155–6, 198 Eternity Class, 23, 133, 148–56, 169, 198 escrache, 18, 87, 177, 187 Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (Navy School of the Mechanics, ESMA), 91–3 ESMA: El Día del Juicio (ESMA: The Day of Judgement), 32 Etchecolatz, Miguel, 191 Eurydice, 46, 60–2 Evans, Susy, 72–3 Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos por Razones Políticas (Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared for Political Reasons), 5 Fanego, Daniel, 176, 182 federal, 103, 107–9, 112, 121, 125 Feinman, José Pablo, 65 Feitlowitz, Margueritte, 92–4 Feld, Claudia, 31–3, 40–1 Feldman, Allen, 10, 91 Felman, Shoshana, 18, 20, 30–7 Filc, Judith, 3–4, 15, 54, 64, 187, 203

252

Freire, Silka, 194 Freud, 9–11, 113, 116, 129–30 Fugard, Athol, 44 Galán, Graciela, 35, 59 Galtieri, Leopoldo Fortunato, 100 Gambaro, Griselda, 7–8, 17, 20–5, 34–48, 50–65, 70–1, 100, 103, 105, 106, 118, 130, 197–8, 203–4, 207 Antígona furiosa (Furious Antigone), 7, 20, 26, 34–6, 40–7, 50–60, 130, 197 Atando cabos (Tying Loose Ends), 20, 50, 54–60, 198 Decir Sí (To Say Yes), 17 Del sol naciente (The Rising Sun), 65 Ganarse la muerte (To Earn One’s Death), 71 La casa sin sosiego (The House Without Calm), 21, 50, 60–2, 198 La malasangre (Bad Blood), 22, 36, 54, 100, 102–6, 110, 118, 126–7 La persistencia (Persistence), 50, 58–60, 207 La señora Macbeth, 54 Real envido (Royal Gambit), 36 García Canclini, Néstor, 151 García Fernández, Miguel, Virtud y valor premiados (Virtue and Courage Rewarded), 107 García Wehbi, Emilio, 9, 19–20, 128, 156, 159–61, 202–3 Proyecto Filoctetes, 9, 156, 159–61, 197 Garzón, Baltasar, 7, 15, 94, 96, 200 Geiger, Conrado, 180 Gelman, Juan, “Carta a mi nieto o nieta” (Letter to my grandson or granddaughter), 63 Generation of ’37, 122 Geneva Conventions, 95 ghosting, 11, 102

INDEX

Gilio, María Esther, 175 Girard, René, 113 Giunta, Andrea, 206 Goffman, Erving, 13 Goldenberg, Jorge, 58, 201 Fotos de infancia (Childhood Photos), 201 Knepp, 58 González Bombal, Inés, 29, 31, 40 González, Horacio, 119 Gorostiza, Carlos, 156–9 El Puente (The Bridge), 156–8 Graham-Jones, Jean, 4, 17, 74, 123, 141, 174 grotesco criollo, 23, 35, 53, 138, 141–3, 164, 169 Grupo Catalinas Sur, El fulgor argentino (Argentine Splendor), 205 Venimos de muy lejos (We Come from Far Away), 205 Guber, Rosana, 102, 115 habeas corpus, 27 hacer l’América, 135 Halbwachs, Maurice, 1 Halvorsen, Erika Identikit:El juego, 189 Vic y Vic, 189 Hayner, Priscilla, 27 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 44 Herman, Judith, 9 Hernández, Paola, 6 Herrera, Matilde, 181 Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Children for Identity and Justice, Against Forgetting and Silence, H.I.J.O.S.), 18, 64, 67, 177 Hirsch, Marianne, 2, 24 historical revisionism, 110 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 128–9, 202 Hough, Guillermo, Plan reservado, 190 Huyssen, Andreas, 11

INDEX

Ibsen, Henrik, A Doll’s House, 204 Iglesias, Herminio, 99–100 Índice de la Abuelidad (Index of Grandparentage), 179 indulto, 58, 77, 92–4, 110, 113, 117, 123, 125–6, 154 Instituto Goethe, 35 Instituto Torcuato di Tella, 70 Instituto Yenesí, 70 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 31 International Monetary Fund, 8 invisible theatre, 161 Irigaray, Luce, 44 Jarry, Alfred, Ubu Roi, 202 Jelin, Elizabeth, 2, 5, 10, 24, 30, 42–3, 176 José Tiburcio Borda Psychiatric Hospital, 199 jurisdiction, 6–7, 15, 25, 31, 34, 69, 94–5, 97, 114, 200 Kaegi, Stefan, Airport Kids, 195 Käes, Rene, 193 Kaiser-Lenoir, Claudia, 135, 144 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 113–14 Kartún, Mauricio, La madonnita, 204 Kaufman, Ester, 27–8 Keane, John, 140–1 Kershaw, Baz, 13 King-Claire, Mary, 179 Kirchner, Cristina, 205 Kirchner, Néstor, 67 Kohan, Martin, 115, 199 Kordon, Diana, 181 Laberinto, 180 La Boca, 134, 205 Lacan, Jacques, 44 Lacasa, Pedro, 108–9 El entierro del loco, traidor, salvaje unitario Urquiza (The Burial of the Crazy Traitor, Savage Unitarian Urquiza), 109 Landsman, Stephan, 95

253

Laragione, Lucía, Criaturas de aire (Creatures of Air), 205 Laub, Dori, 47, 177 Lavalle, Juan, 118 Lenin, 116 León, Federico, 20, 32, 133, 167–8, 199–201, 204–5 Cachetazo de campo (Country Slap), 205 Mil quinientos metros sobre el nivel de Jack (Fifteen hundred Meters Above the Level of Jack), 133, 166–7 Yo en el futuro (I, in the Future), 116 Levin, Eugenia, 182 Levy-Daniel, Héctor, El archivista, 188 Lewin, Norberto El Piquete, 188–9 Tú no eres mi padre (You are not my Father), 189 Ley de Obediencia Debida (Due Obedience Law), 14, 46, 92–4 Ley de Pacificación Nacional (Law of National Pacification), 29 Ley de Punto Final (Full Stop Law), 14, 46, 94 Lima, Perla Zayas de, 39, 138 Lizarazu, Gladys, 20, 170–1, 198, 201–2 López, Julio Jorge, 191 Lorenz, Federico, 64–5 Los Macocos, 9, 19–20, 23, 161–9, 171, 204, 228 El Supercrisol, 204 Los Albornoz, 9, 19, 23, 133, 161–71, 197, 204 Luder, Ítalo, 99–100 Lusnich, Ana Laura, 36, 71, 174 Lyons, Charles, 72 macro-public sphere, 140–1 Madres del Dolor (Mothers of Pain), 67

254

Madres de Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo), 5, 7, 30, 35–6, 42–3, 59, 62–8, 87, 93, 130, 187–8 Magrini, César, 119 Malamud-Goti, Jaime, 17 Malvinas/Falklands, 21, 51, 64–5, 86, 99–100, 103, 111, 113, 199 Manso, Leonor, 181 Marechal, Leopoldo, Antígona Vélez, 51, 126 Martin, Carol, 200 Martínez de Hoz, José Alfredo, 8, 135 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, Radiografía de la Pampa, 122 Martínez-Olcóz, Nieves, 38 Martínez, Tomás Eloy, 115 Massera, Emilio Eduardo, 32, 46 mazorca, 103 Mazziotti, Nora, 53 Méndez, Juan, 11 Menem, Carlos Saúl, 8–13, 19, 22–3, 77, 92–4, 110–139, 148, 151–60, 167, 171, 190, 198, 201–2 Merelli, Cristina, The Shoes, 188 micropolíticas de la resistencia (micropolitics of resistance), 71 micro-public sphere, 140–1 Mignone, Emilio, 93 Milosevic, Slobodan, 7, 95 Mogliani, Laura, 37, 80 Molina Pico, Enrique Emilio, 93 Monteverdi, Claudio, 60 Monti, Ricardo, 12–13, 20, 22, 100, 106, 117–27, 198, 203 Finlandia, 100, 127 Una noche con el Señor Magnus e hijos (A Night with Mr. Magnus and his Children), 126 Una pasión sudamericana (A South American Passion Play), 12, 22, 100, 106, 117–30, 197–8, 203

INDEX

Montonero, 15, 63, 101, 115 Movimiento Nacional de la Restauración (National Movement for Restoration), 100–1 Müller, Heiner, Hamletmachine, 202 multiplicidad dramática (dramatic multiplicity), 71 Muraña, Bettina, 35 murga, 18, 187 Murúa, Lautaro, 101–3, 126 National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, 174 neogrotesco, 141 neosainete, 141 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 122 Nicholson, Helen, 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44 Nino, Carlos, 27, 31, 109 Novaro, Marcos, 16, 105–6 nuevos pobres (new poor), 136 Nunca Más (Never Again), 7, 16, 20, 25–7, 29, 33, 35–6, 43, 49, 87, 91, 96 Obersztern, Mariana, El aire alrededor (The Surrounding Air), 192 Ogás Puga, Grisby, 176 Oren, Laura, 178 Orpheus, 20–1, 49–50, 60–2 Padres y Amigos del Soldado (Parents and Friends of the Soldier), 65 Palermo, Vicente, 16, 105–6 pampa, 51, 122, 126 patria, 3–4, 14, 16, 24 Pavlovsky, Eduardo, 14–15, 17, 20–1, 58, 69–98, 200, 207 El señor Galíndez, 69, 75–6, 97 El señor Laforgue, 69, 97 La espera trágia (The Tragic Wait), 70 Pablo, 58, 71–2, 77–81, 84 Poroto, 71–2, 80–5 Potestad, 14–15, 21, 70–98, 200

INDEX

Solo Brumas (Alone in the Haze), 207 Somos (We Are), 70 Telarañas (Spiderwebs), 71–2, 77 Tercero incluído (Third Included), 17 Payne, Leigh, 93 Pelento, María Lucila, 37 Pellarolo, Silvia, 37, 44–5, 134–5, 168 Pellettieri, Osvaldo, 36, 119, 125, 141 Penchaszadeh, Victor, 179 Pérez, Mariana Eva, Instrucciones para coleccionistas de mariposas, 189 Pernías, Antonio, 92, 97 Perón, Eva, 52, 114, 115, 131 Perón, Juan Domingo, 52, 111, 114–15, 131, 157–8, 194 Persino, María Silvina, 161 Pinochet, Augusto, 7, 94–6, 197 Plaza de Mayo, 5, 18, 26, 35, 66, 77, 82–3, 125, 130, 173, 175, 177–8, 183 Pons, Delia, 185 postmemory, 2, 24, 177, 193, 207 Proaño Gómez, Lola, 167 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Process of Reorganization), 5 Propato, Cecilia, En lo de Chou, 189 Proyecto Archivos, 200 Proyecto Filoctetes, 9, 156, 159–61, 197 Proyecto Museos, 199 Puenzo, Luis, 17, 90 La historia oficial (The Official Story), 17, 90–1 Quiroga, Osvaldo, 38 realism, 20, 23, 142, 204 Rebellato, Dan, 6, 155 reconciliation, 3, 10–13, 24, 54–7, 84, 92, 103, 105, 110, 113, 115–17, 197–8, 207 Reggiardo Tolosa twins, 185 Rejtman, Martín, 199

255

repatriation, 13, 22, 110–17, 123, 126–7, 130 restored behavior, 5, 11 Right to Identity, 23, 173–88 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 60 Rimini Protokoll, Airport Kids, 195 Río de la Plata (River Plate), 14, 50, 69, 91, 111 Rivera López, Jorge, 174, 176 Rivera López, Luis, 183 Roach, Joseph, 11, 113 Roca, Julio Argentino, 190 Rocca, Paola Cortés, 115 Roffé, Reina, 53 Rolón, Juan Carlos, 91–2, 97 Romero, Luis Alberto, 154 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 4, 12–13, 22, 54, 100–31 Rose, Gillian, 40 Sábato, Ernesto, 26 Saenz Peña Law, 134 sainete, 19–20, 23, 134–5, 139–41, 143, 148, 155, 157, 162, 168–9, 204 salidas creativas (creative outlets), 39 Sánchez, Florencio, 142, 204 Barranco abajo (Down by the Gully), 142 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 44 Sanz, María de los Ángeles, 141, 176 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 118, 121 Schaffer, Kay, 10 Schechner, Richard, 11, 13, 74 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 9, 169 Scilingo, Adolfo, 7, 14–15, 21, 69, 70, 91–8, 200 Segal, Charles, 44 Señores ¡De pié! (Gentlemen, Stand!), 32 Sienra, Ariel, 85 Sierra, Santiago, La traslación de una cacerolada (The Displacement of a Cacerolada), 206 Sikkink, Kathryn, 27, 30, 58

256

siluetazo, 39 Silva, Eduardo, 8 Silveyra, Soledad, 100 Simón, Julio (“Julián el Turco”), 91 Sinay, Sergio, 67 Slaughter, Joseph, 10 Smith, Sidonie, 10 Snow, Clyde, 179 Solomonoff, Julia, 20, 50, 56 Hermanas (Sisters), 20, 50, 56–8 Somigliana, Carlos, 32, 174 Sorensen, Diana, 121 Spregelburd, Rafael, Lúcido (Lucid), 204 Steiner, George, 44 Surrogation, 12, 113 Svampa, Maristella, 135, 136, 151, 156 Szperling, Cecilia, Confesionario, 199 Tantanian, Alejandro, Los mansos (The Tame Ones), 204 Tarantuviez, Susana, 36 Taxidou, Olga, 41–2 Taylor, Diana, 4–5, 24, 33, 42–3, 45, 47, 56, 87, 102, 177, 187 Teatro Abierto, 17, 23, 36, 76, 173–7, 188 Teatro Babilonia, 89 Teatro Calibán, 80 Teatro de la Máscara, 156 Teatro del Viejo Palermo, 72, 77 Teatro Liceo, 182 Teatro Nacional Cervantes (National Cervantes Theatre), 52, 181, 191 Teatro Olimpia, 100 Teatro Picadero, 174 Teatro Tabarís, 174 Teatro Victoria, 109 Teatroxlaidentidad Itinerante (Traveling Theatre for Identity), 190 Teatroxlaidentidad (Theatre for Identity), 173, 175–6, 192, 198, 203 Teitel, Ruti, 7, 29, 94–5

INDEX

Tellas, Vivi, 192, 199–200 Biodrama, 192, 199 Escuela de conducción (Driving School), 200 Mi mamá y mi tía (My Mom and my Aunt), 200 Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio, 199 Proyecto Archivos, 200 Proyecto Museos, 199 Tenembaum, Ernesto, 181 Tirri, Néstor, 126 Tolcachir, Claudio, La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Omission of the Coleman Family), 204 Torres Molina, Susana, Ella, 204 Transitional Justice, 11, 17, 20–1, 25–6, 29, 31, 34, 41, 49, 102, 105–6 Trastoy, Beatriz, 12, 38, 120, 126, 138, 175 Tres filósofos con bigotes (Three Philosophers with Moustaches), 200 Trial of the Generals, 7, 13–20, 25–43, 46, 48, 50–1, 66, 77, 90, 97, 125 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa (TRC), 11, 94 Turner, Terence, 151 uncanny, 123–9 Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union Party, UCR), 99 Unitarian, 103–4, 109, 121 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 179 United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 31 United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 31 Ure, Alberto, 20, 50, 52, 76, 148–9, 151–4, 175 Urquiza, Justo José de, 103, 109–10, 126–7

INDEX

Valencia, Anabella, Mi nombre es (My Name Is), 189 Vallejo, César, 149 Verbitsky, Horacio, 91–2, 96 Verdery, Katherine, 114 Verfremdungseffekt, 18 Veronese, Daniel, 19–20, 128–9, 192, 202–4 El desarrollo de la civilización venidera (The Development of Civilization to Come), 204 Espía de una mujer que se mata (Spying on a Woman who Kills Herself ), 204 La forma que se despliega (The Unfolding Form), 192 Mujeres soñaron caballos (Women Dreamt Horses), 204 Vezzetti, Hugo, 87, 116 Viola, Roberto Eduardo, 46 Vitullo, Julieta, 64 ¿Vos sabés quién sos? (Do you know who you are?), 18, 181, 184–7

257

Walsh, Rodolfo, “Carta a mis amigos” (Letter to My Friends), 63 Wannamaker, Annette, 46 White, Hayden, 10, 121 World Bank, 8 World Cup, 1978, 86, 180 Wortman, Ana, 162, 165, 172 Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (Fiscal Petroleum Fields, YPF), 116 Yusem, Laura, 8, 35, 37, 43, 50, 60, 62, 79, 100–1, 203 Yuyachkani, 44, 56 Zangaro, Patricia, 18, 24, 182, 184, 188, 190, 203, 205 A propósito de la duda (With Regard to Doubt), 18, 24, 182, 184, 187–91, 203 Última luna (Last Moon), 190, 205